| Group Cooperative Learning(GCL)is a process of knowledge construction that is based on learners’ common learning aim by applying approaches of helping each other and learning from each other,which can stimulate students’ awareness of self-learning and reduce the interference of emotional factors.Anxiety is an important emotional variable that affects learners’ second language acquisition,but as a unique learning activity,listening is particularly prone to be anxious.With the wide application of GCL,researchers have paid more and more attention to study on the effect of GCL on foreign language anxiety,but there are still few studies on the specific effects of GCL on foreign language listening anxiety and listening ability.Considering the importance of the GCL on reducing the listening anxiety and improving listening ability,this study adopts the method of combining quantitative and qualitative researches to explore the effects of GCL on high school students’ listening anxiety and listening proficiency.The research participants were first-year high school students of two parallel classes chosen from a high school in Shandong province,and they were divided into the experiment group 1(EG1)and the experiment group 2(EG2),there were 50 students in each group.The experimental data were collected from quasi-experiment,interviews,and questionnaires.The study was conducted for 16 weeks: participants were asked to take the listening exercises once two weeks,and the EG1 and EG2 alternately used different cooperative approaches;two experimental groups were respectively tested for the listening anxiety questionnaire and the listening test,and the experimental data was quantitatively analyzed by SPSS 20.0 software to investigate the differences between the listening anxiety and the listening proficiency of the two experimental groups before and after the experiment.At the same time,the experiment randomly selected 5 students from each group to make semi-structured interviews,and the results of interviews were transferred and analyzed by the author to explore the reasons why GCL affected the listening anxiety and listening proficiency.After the data collection,the author integrated all data to annotate and obtain some topics with common characteristics.Based on the previous theories in GCL,the author finally obtained the effects of GCL on high school students’ listening anxiety and listening proficiency.The results of the study showed that,firstly,compared with before the experiment,the overall average listening anxiety of participants from 3.066 decreased to 2.065,and in the all anxious factors,the mean of the factor of Lack of Listening Self-confidence was significantly reduced,which indicates that GCL can reduce the students’ listening anxiety,especially the anxiety of Lack of Listening Self-confidence in listening.Secondly,overall mean of listening proficiency in participants raised from 26.892 to 28.944,especially those who were with low English listening level made a great progress in improving listening proficiency after the experiment.It indicates GCL can improve students’ listening proficiency,especially the learners with low level in English listening.In addition,the analysis of interview shows that the timely and effective feedback carried out in GCL could greatly raise participants’ successful experience,which was very helpful to reduce the student’ listening anxiety and improve their listening proficiency.Compared with previous studies,this present study made innovations in the research contents and participants,achieved expectant goals and proved the positive effects of GCL on students’ listening anxiety and listening proficiency.However,there are some limitations in this study: the participants were limited,the study time was short and the choice of listening materials was only decided by one teacher and so on.For future research,it can make up for the defects in these studies by expanding the sample size,extending the study time and so on. |
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