Examining The Application Of Group Work In English Majors' Classroom At The Foundation Level In China--An Intercultural Perspective

Group work as a teaching technique is widely used in CLT classrooms in the West, but it is less appreciated by teachers and students of the English major at the foundation level in China. This thesis is an attempt to find out the reason for the divergence between the East and West in the attitude towards and the application of group work. The thesis begins with a brief introduction to the history and tradition of EFL education in China and the West, focusing on Communicative Language Teaching and the role group work plays in CLT. Then the thesis includes a survey on the application of group work in China's EFL majors' classrooms at the foundation level focusing on the relationship between teacher talk and group work and the characteristics of group work in China's EFL classrooms. The third part of the thesis is a discussion of the differences in learning styles between Chinese and Western students. These learning styles are classified into cognitive and relational categories including such continuums as field-dependence versus field-independence, cooperation versus competition, dependent versus independent learning, and participatory versus passive learning. The thesis ends with the analysis of the cultural background of these differences pointing out the relationship between cultural patterns and learning styles.