A Study On Improvement Of Students With Learning Difficulties Through Cooperative Learning In College English Class

ii Cooperative Learning(CL) advocates the cooperation between students, and is one of the important learning theories at home and abroad. Cooperative Learning takes group as its basic form and encourages students to perform all kinds of learning activities in group or small team, help each other, study materials together, and rewards students for the achievements or performance of the entire group. Since Cooperative Learning emerged as a new leading approach in the 1970s in the United States, it has been widely used by western educators in the teaching of many subjects and has achieved great success in the West. However, in China, the research on Cooperative Learning is still at the starting stage.For a variety of reasons, a number of students with learning difficulties (LDs) exist in colleges in our country. LDs in this thesis are those who can't achieve the standard requirement of English curriculum, and usually can't reach the average grade although they have normal intellectual level and have no perceptive obstacles. The existence of LDs has brought great difficulty to the improving of teaching quality in College English teaching. So, how to help LDs out of trouble is an important task for all of the College English teachers to undertake.Based on Cooperative Learning models, the present study tries to integrate Cooperative Learning with College English classroom teaching, and aims to test the hypothesis that1. If Cooperative Learning is conducted in College English class, the English LDs' total academic achievement could be enhanced.2. If Cooperative Learning is conducted in College English class, the English LDs' academic achievement in reading, writing and listening could be enhanced.3. If Cooperative Learning is conducted in College English class, the English LDs' attitude toward English learning could be changed and their attitude toward Cooperative Learning and its effect could be positive.The study was conducted during the autumn semester of the 2010, and the subjects were 15 LDs in one class which the researcher randomly chose from Gansu Political Science and Law Institute. 15 LDs, 6 girls and 9 boys, were sophomores, and their major was law, and their ages ranged from 19 to 20. During the study, the researcher applied the major models of Cooperative Learning to the College English classroom, and used tests, questionnaires and interview as the instruments. All the tables and statistics were obtained by means of SPSS 17.0 software. The results of the tests show that there are significant differences in the total academic achievements (p=0.001<0.05) and academic achievement in reading(p=0.001<0.05), writing(p=0.004<0.05) and listening (p=0.010<0.05). Therefore, the application of Cooperative Learning in College English class could enhance the LDs' total academic achievement and academic achievement in reading, writing and listening. The results of the questionnaire and the interview show that the application of Cooperative Learning could improve classroom atmosphere and most of the LDs have a positive attitude and show a preference to this teaching approach.Although the researcher has made great efforts to ensure the objectivity and validity of the study, there are some limitations to be paid attention to. The sample size of the subjects in the present study is not big enough. The present research restricts its sample selection from one class in one university. One semester was not long enough for fully proving the effectiveness of a teaching approach. If the time of the study had been longer, the results would have been much more persuasive. However, the researcher hope that the present research will provide some enlightenment for the future College English teaching in China.