Heterogeneous Group Teaching Experiment Based On Vocational School Students’ Learning Autonomy

With the development of knowledge economy age and China’sintegration into the globalization, English as an international language hasplayed an important role in China than ever before. To meet the need ofthe country and society for qualified personnel in the new era and keep upwith the new development of higher education in China, newrequirements have been proposed for vocational school English teaching.It clearly states that teaching idea is“skills-oriented and application forthe purpose”. The goal of English teaching is to develop students’language ability. For the realities of the college English teaching:large-class, passive learning environment, negative emotions on Englishlearning etc., which makes teachers worry about how to teach Englishwell.In this background, Cooperative Learning (hereafter CL) hasemerged. It refers to learning with group and these groups are assigned bythe teacher, and students have to include regular face-to-face interactionin the classroom setting. The use of cooperative learning in the vocationalschool English classroom can not only greatly improve teachingeffectiveness, but also alleviate the contradictions of large-class teaching,develop students’autonomous learning ability, co-consciousness and thesense of competition. Through CL, we can compensate the deficiencies ofthe traditional English teaching, to promote communication between teachers-students and students-students in the teaching process, and to getthe goal of the full development of students’English proficiency andcommunication skills.Through heterogeneous group teaching for non-English majors invocational school in accordance with students’autonomous learningdifferences to answer the questions: 1) whether there is any correlationbetween grouping way and academic performance. 2) whether it has anyimpact on student learning autonomy performance through heterogeneousgroup teaching. 3) how to be more scientific and rational in groupallocating to achieve higher performance in the future. The experimentalstudy is conducted with a hypothesis that the students in theheterogeneous group will outperform those who are in the homogeneousgroup. This article provides an overview of the definition of cooperativelearning, characteristics of CL, the differences and connections betweenheterogeneous group and homogeneous group and a brief introduction onthe autonomous learning rating scale. This study involves oneexperimental class (EC) which is exposed to heterogeneous study groupbased on the difference of students’autonomous learning and one controlclass (CC) with homogeneous study group. All the participants arestudents of Grade 2009 with intermediate and under-intermediate Englishlevel from Hunan Vocational College of Science and Technology(HNVCST). Through a semester of such CL mode, the researcher has collected alarge number of experimental data by means of questionnaires, tests,interviews, diary, and classroom observations. By the use of SPSS18.0 toanalyze the data from the pre-test and post-test we can see that EC wassignificantly better than CC (Sig. = .00<0.05), which means students’English ability in the EC had significantly improved than CC and makesthe author’s hypothesis acceptable. We also see that compared with CC,students in the EC are more active and want to express their views andideas through an analysis of the classroom observations, diary,questionnaires and interviews.After this experiment, we can see that CL has played a positive rolein vocational school English learning; especially the heterogeneous grouplearning is more feasible and operable. However, there are also someproblems and limitations in the process of the experiment. In order to getmore scientific and credible data, we still need to make study andexperimental.