The Use Of Cooperative Learning In English Teaching

The consciousness and ability to cooperate are the basic diathesis of modernists. With the development of technology and the coming of information society, it is very important to know how to cooperate with others, how to express one's opinion effectively and how to generalize and absorb others' opinions. Therefore, it is very important to cultivate students' cooperative ability. The use of cooperative learning implies a change from teacher-centered learning to a focus on learner-centered learning. It presents learning as an active social process of communication with others.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the influence of cooperative learning on students of vocational schools. Research questions included 1) Will cooperative learning help students in English study? 2) Will cooperative learning enhance students' interest in learning English? 3) Will students improve their spoken English through cooperative learning?The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One gives a brief explanation on the research topic and the outline of the whole thesis. Chapter Two offers literature review that provides theoretical support for the thesis. Chapter Three reports research methodology conducted by the author. Chapter Four offers the results and data analysis. Chapter Five is a conclusion to the whole thesis.The study was conducted in an English course at Beijing Foreign Trade School in the autumn semester of 2003. Class A was control group while Class B was experiment group. Thirty-five students in Class B participated in this study.A mixed research approach was used in this study, such as natural teaching, tests, questionnaires, etc. Various forms of data were collected through tests, questionnaires.By using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows, a commonly used tool for managing, analyzing, and displaying data, two-tailed t-test was conducted; at the same time, an analysis was also done in order to verify the quality of the researcher-designed questionnaire on students' learning interest.The analysis of the combined data in this research indicates that cooperative learning may 1) help students in English study; 2) enhance students' interest in learning English; 3) improve students' speaking ability.At the end of the thesis, conclusion of the study, limitations and suggestions for future research were discussed.