Research On Group Cooperative Learning In Junior High School English Teaching

Known as one of the most important and successful approaches in teaching reform in recent decades,group cooperative learning rose in the United States and has been favored by experts and scholars at home since it was first introduced to China.Group cooperative learning accords much with The English Curriculum Standards in Compulsory Education(2011)published in the year of 2012,which stresses that it is the task of English subject to train students’ basic competence and to develop their thinking quality,exploring ability and cooperative consciousness,at the same time to stimulate students’ learning interest,motivation as well as enthusiasm in English.However,group cooperative learning is almost used in demonstration class at present,which is more of a formality rather than a practical teaching method.Based on this background,the present experimental research is conducted on group cooperative learning in junior high school English classroom in order to investigate if it is more effective than the traditional teaching mode in improving students’ English learning interest,motivation,enthusiasm as well as academic achievements by adopting the instruments of questionnaires,interview and English tests.The research subjects are96 students from Class 13 and Class 14,Grade 7,Qingdao X Junior High School.The findings are generalized as follows.(1)In regard to the effectiveness of group cooperative learning on subjects’ learning interest,motivation and enthusiasm in English,results of post questionnaire demonstrate that EC has scored 47.85 on total average,which are 8.41 points higher than CC(39.44).As for the inner class progress,EC has achieved 11.17 points more than before while CC has only gained an increase of 2.15 points.Meanwhile,the results of questionnaires are also verified by these from the interview.(2)Statistics results of English tests show that in the post-test,the mean score of EC is 102.61 while that of theCC is 93.34,9.27 points higher than that of the CC which is significantly different at0.01 levels.The passing rate in the EC is up to 100% with a growth of 4.17% while there is a reduction of 4.25% in the CC than before.The excellent rate in the EC is89.58%,which is 15.11% higher than the CC(74.47%).All these findings demonstrate that group cooperative learning is very effective than the traditional teaching mode on improving students’ learning interest,motivation,enthusiasm as well as academic achievements in English.In view of the above findings,the author offers three suggestions for English teachers when using group cooperative learning in practical teaching.First,learning groups should be organized reasonably and scientifically based on the personality differences and English levels of students to guarantee the implementation of group cooperative learning in class successfully.Secondly,cooperative learning tasks should be individualized from easier to more difficult to satisfy the needs of students in various English levels.Thirdly,English teachers should be fully prepared with more time and energy to meet the challenges and achieve due success.