| English writing is a fundamental skill for interpersonal communication; hence it is necessary for the Chinese-speaking learners of English to master this skill. Yet, Chinese high school students’ performance in English writing, on average, is far from satisfactory. This incompetence in writing is in large part due to the deficiency of classroom teaching method in Chinese high schools, therefore, it is of great significance to explore the influence of teaching strategies on the cultivation of students’ writing competence.Cooperative learning is a system of teaching strategy that encourages students to cooperate in heterogeneous groups to achieve a common goal and students are rewarded according to the success of the team. In order to complete the task together, students should have a clear division of responsibility of learning and facilitate the learning process by mutual help.Based on previous researches, this thesis seeks to examine the effect of cooperative learning on English writing learning by Chinese students in the classroom-setting. It focuses on exploring the following two research questions:(1) Can cooperative learning improve the students’ writing ability?(2) Can cooperative learning increase the students’ writing interest?The study recruited 61 students from the two classes in Senior Three of PINBA XINYI Senior High School, Guizhou province. The pretest was conducted before the experiment and the result showed that the means of the two classes were 18.52 and 18.40 respectively, and t=.19, P =.85 >.05. This proved that there was no significant difference between the two classes in terms of their English writing level, therefore, the two classes were assigned to the experimental class and the control class. In addition, the experimental class was also required to do a questionnaire on writing interest before and after the experiment.The cooperative learning strategy was used in the experimental class, and the traditional teaching approach was applied in the control class. After the experiment, the posttest was carried out. The data collected from all the posttest were analyzed by means of SPSS 15.0.The results of the posttest showed that the mean scores of the two classes’ writing were 19.61 and 18.60 respectively, and t=2.46, P =.86 >.05. This indicates that the mean difference between the two classes’ writing scores did not reach the significant level. This demonstrates that CL did not help improve the writing achievement of the experimental class.The analysis of the questionnaire showed that CL is helpful in increasing the experimental class’ interest in writing. After the experiment, there was a big increase in the percentage of the students who spent more time on writing, read more reference books on writing and collected more good sentences from books and other sources in order to enlarge their bank of English collocations. In addition, most of them found writing more relaxing and as a result, they are more motivated to write compositions out of their interest rather than doing it as an assignment.In sum, the present study found that CL is superior to the traditional way of teaching in increasing the students’ interest in writing; however, it did not produce gains in the students’ writing achievement. Based on the major findings of the experiment, the author called on the English teachers to pay more attention to exploring more effective methods of writing teaching. |
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