A Case Study On The Effects Of Applying Cooperative Language Learning To Enhance Medical Majors' Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension abilities are regarded as the most essential skills in EFL environment. Most of the EFL learners, especially the university students, always feel stressful when reading voluminous reading materials. For some low achievers and average students in College English study, they may choose to give up reading due to the poor acquisition of reading skills and limited vocabulary. For the university English teachers, how to promote the reading proficiency of the students and how to teach in a big multi-level class had become an important task.Reading is not an easy task for university students, especially for the medical majors. Because English is not their major in universities, most of them have little time to learn English systematically. According to the author's research, abundant of university students only rely on their knowledge of English acquired in middle school while studying. To this extent, reading skill improvement and test preparation to some students is meaningless. Furthermore, there is always gap among students with different academic abilities.The main purpose of this study is to examine whether or not the cooperative language learning are effective in enhancing the overall reading proficiency. The researcher intends to detect how medical majors, as common EFL learners, might learn more efficiently in terms of reading comprehension than students in traditional teacher-centered class by dividing students into heterogeneous groups and teaching them the theory of CLL. The focus of the research is on the outcomes and process of using CLL to promote students'reading proficiency. Specifically, two points are set to investigate the effectiveness and progress of students'reading comprehension in the process of research. The aim of the research is mostly about to test the truth of the following two hypotheses: 1) CLL is effective in improving students'English reading Proficiency. 2) The Students in Experimental Class have positive responses towards CLL.The author makes systematic research on applying Cooperative Language Learning to medical majors'extensive reading class. The paper consists of five chapters:Introduction part is a brief introduction of the research background, the significance and purpose of the research.Chapter one is literature review. It consists of the overview on CLL researches and the brief review of the English reading comprehension instruction. Chapter two is the theoretical framework of CLL. The author systematically expounds some theories relevant to CLL and the relationship between CLL and English teaching, etc.Chapter three is research design and methodology. It consist the research questions, participants, instruments and research design, data and data collection, and research procedure. This chapter is the most important part of the paper.Conclusions are drawn in Chapter four. The research results show that CLL has not only improved the medical majors'reading proficiency but also boosted their motivation and improved the atmosphere of English reading class.Some didactical implications are put forward in chapter five and some limitations of the research are also listed in this chapter.