On Cooperative Learning In Senior Middle School English Writing Teaching

As a communicative tool, English plays an important part in international communicationand cooperation, as for English writing, one typical form of communication also weighs much.However in China, we do not attach much importance to English writing in the school education.Thus, many serious problems exist in the current English writing teaching.Cooperative learning approach is a kind of pedagogical strategic system promoted by Slavin,Johnson et al in the1970s in America, and it encourages students to perform all kinds of learningactivities in small group, emphasizes the learner-centered class, in which the teacher plays a roleof director, cooperator, supervisor who attempts to enhance teacher-student and student-studentinteractions and promotes students to learn sufficiently, enables students to work cooperatively.In cooperative learning students help each other to study some materials and can be rewarded forthe achievements or performance of the entire group. Rewarding the group for the achievementsof every group members reduces the pressure on the students and enhances students’initiative tofinish assignments.Cooperative learning experiment was conducted from September2010to January2011.The subjects are students in grade2from two classes in Changyuan No.1Middle School ofXinxiang city Henan Province, the two classes are at the average level in the whole grade andthey are taught by the same teacher, the author names them the experimental group and thecontrol group with respectively72and76students.In the experimental group the cooperativelearning approach is conducted while the traditional teaching method in the control group.In this research, literature review, and questionnaires are used to get the date for analysisand discussion. The conclusion can be drawn through comparison and analysis: In Englishteaching, cooperative learning approach is more effective than the traditional teaching method. Itcan decrease students’anxiety build up their confidence and improve the writing abilities, at thesame time, it can encourage students to work hard together in a group, thus enhancing theircooperative skills.The author meets with some difficulties in operating the experiment:(1) Students lack thecooperative skills, group members will argue with each other when they can not come to anagreement, and the class is in a chaos;(2) Over dependence on mother tongue to a great extentreduces the foreign language learning efficiency.Although difficulties arise in the conducting process, we can take the following measures tocope with them:(1) the teacher can encourage students to take pare in the class activities to makethem strengthen the sense of participating, cultivate their positive attitude, try to speak out theirown opinions and at the same time listen to others’patiently.(2) the teacher can appoint one group member as the supervisor, reminding others of communicating in English.Finally the experimental study is carried out in one middle school and it lasts for only nineweeks, so if the study had a larger coverage and lasted longer the result would be moreconvincing.