Developing A Dialogical Community Of Collaborative Learners In The English Classroom

In recent decades, there have been a multitude of reform efforts in English teaching in China. One major focus of these efforts has been to effect classroom-level changes. Specifically, efforts have aimed to create more collaborative and student-centered environments, where students have opportunities to produce language and negotiate meaning as part of a community of learners.Through an in-depth study of implementing collaborative dialogue into Integrated English classroom, the researcher sought to deepen and extend the understanding of the effect of collaborative dialogue. And the researcher's inquiry was guided by the following questions: How does collaborative learning intrinsically motivate the students in their willingness to communicate and learn the language? How have their idea and understanding of learning, and knowledge changed? What can collaborative learning do with students' language learning attitude and responsibility attitude? In designing and carrying out this study, another aim is to find out the learning experiences of the students in collaborative dialoguing—how it really helps students learn, and in what way? hope it may help the researcher make some improvements and learn when and in what procedure she shall adopt it in class in the future.The subjects were 20 second-year -English majors and 35 bi-degree students from the English language department. The information that forms the core of this study was obtained by means of three survey instruments: classroom behavior observation, interview and a students' questionnaire. The post- questionnaire consists of 40 items arranged in a Likert scale format. The central quantitative findings from the survey are summarized in tables. Critical analysis is made based on the perceptions held by the students.This study finds that collaborative learning intrinsically motivated the students in their willingness to communicate and learn English and changed their idea and understanding of language learning to the positive. Collaborative dialogue enhances the social relationships among the community of learners, hence a healthy learning community is established. At the same time collaborative dialogue provides opportunities for learners to practice critical thinking skills and provides the opportunity for students to practice language skills as well. At the end, the paper tries to find out the implications of this research to teaching and further research.