The Application Of Task-Based Cooperative Learning Approach In College English Writing Teaching

English writing belongs to an important form of language productive ability. With the improvement of English learning proficiency, the learners’ writing ability has become more important and received more attention. However, English writing teaching has been a very weak aspect of college English teaching on account of the traditional writing teaching mode and so on. In recent years, the study of writing teaching has become the focus among the majority of teachers and scholars, and exploring effective teaching methods of English writing is a heavy and arduous task of the whole process of college English teaching. The researchers both at home and abroad have made a lot of researches applying Task-based Language Teaching(TBLT) and Cooperative Learning(CL) to college English writing teaching, but most of them are focused on TBLT or CL separately. There exist some problems which need to be solved by the studies on the combination of TBLT and CL. Therefore, the author combines TBLT with CL to produce a new teaching method, which is Task-Based Cooperative Learning Approach(TBCLA). It aims to explore the effect of TBCLA on college students’ English writing ability and writing anxiety through empirical study and tries to find a more effective way to college English writing teaching.This research tries to apply TBCLA to college English writing teaching to improve the students’ writing level and relieve writing anxiety from the perspective of Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics, Krashen’s input hypothesis, Swain’s output hypothesis and constructivist theory, and according to the writing problems that college students have and the researcher’s teaching experience. In order to testify the effectiveness of TBCLA on college English writing, the empirical study was carried out in the first half year of 2015 in Shandong Normal University, which lasted 16 weeks and took 100 freshmen majoring in Physics and Electronics as research subjects. One of the parallel classes is the Experimental Class(EC) and the other is the Control Class(CC). The purpose of doing so is to answer the following three research questions: Firstly, is there any positive impact on the writing skills of college students from the Task-Based Cooperative Learning Approach? If there is, which aspects(content,structure, language expression, coherence in discourse, grammar, wording and mechanics) do the positive impact reflect in? Secondly, which group can benefit the most from TBCLA onwriting competence as to different academic achievement students in EC? Thirdly, can the TBCLA relieve college students’ English writing anxiety? If it can, which aspects(cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and avoidance behavior) will be relieved?In this research experiment, TBCLA was employed to EC while CC still adopted the traditional Presentation — Practice — Production teaching mode. The researcher mainly used writing test, questionnaire and interview to carry out this research. Before the performed experiment, pre-test of students’ writing level and questionnaire were conducted both in EC and CC, then the experiment was performed in EC and CC separately through a series of writing tasks which lasted 16 weeks. After the experiment, the post-test of writing and questionnaire were carried out in EC and CC. And the researcher conducted an interview among fifty percent of the students(25 in all) from each group in EC after the end of the experiment. At last, all the data collected from the experiment were put into Excel forms and analyzed through SPSS 17.0.The results of experiment show that the writing proficiency of students in EC compared with that of students in CC has obviously improved, specifically in content, structure,language expression, coherence in discourse, grammar and wording. The experimental data indicate that the high-score group students can benefit the most from TBCLA on writing competence. Meanwhile, the mean score of second language writing anxiety in EC compared with that in CC has obviously decreased, specifically in somatic anxiety and cognitive anxiety.Thus, the experiment can convincingly demonstrate that TBCLA is effective to improve college students’ writing competence and relieve students’ writing anxiety. So it is valuable to do such an experiment by combining TBLT with CL into TBCLA and applying it to college English writing teaching.However, there are some defects in this experiment, such as the short period of experiment time, the small size of samples, the implementation process of TBCLA, and so on.So some related studies need to be carried out in the future to improve these aspects.