Cooperative Learning And Its Implementation In Higher Vocational College English Classroom

The thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of the implementation of Cooperative Learning (CL) in Higher Vocational College English (non-English majors) class and to activate students' interest in English, improve students' autonomous learning, cooperative abilities and comprehensive abilities of English so as to promote the English teaching and learning quality of Higher Vocational College (HVC).For a long time, the whole class teaching model has been playing a dominant role in today's Higher Vocational College English classroom, which fails to meet the different levels of students in English, and many linguistic activities like role-play, oral discussions, etc. cannot be carried out flexibly. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a new teaching method which is beneficial for all students and advantageous for conducting students' language activities-Cooperative Learning Method.CL is a system of teaching and learning method that makes students cooperate in heterogeneous teams to achieve team-learning goals and earn their reward (the teacher awards group members bonus points if they perform very well) according to the achievement of the whole group. It has become an effective teaching method throughout the world. Piaget's constructive learning theory, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development theory, Mead's social interaction theory, Lewin's group dynamics theory and Maslow's need theory all contribute to cooperative learning.Piaget's constructive learning theory holds that learning is not merely a transfer from the outside to the inside. More importantly, it is a process in which learners fulfill, enrich and adapt their knowledge system through the interaction between the old and new knowledge and experience. The constructive learning theory lays special emphasis on the interaction between the subject and his surrounding environment. Vygotsky in his development theory proposes the idea of zone of proximal development (ZPD) which tells us that under the guidance of adults and cooperation with superior companions, children will demonstrate their potential level of development and it contributes to transform the ZPD to the scope of the actual level. Thus, in cooperative learning, students with different levels are able to learn from each other's strong points and make up for their week points, which will deepen their understanding of the problem and promote students' learning quality. Mead's social interaction theory holds that meaningful learning is through the interaction between people. Student-student interaction in cooperative learning can effectively promote mutual communication, imitation, remedies and common development. Lewin, as one of the representatives of group dynamics theory, regards that the essence of group is the interdependence through which students form a unit. Hence, in cooperative learning, students with different knowledge structure are complementary to each other, which enable them to complete the study task through collaborative efforts. Maslow points out that everyone has communicative needs, demonstration needs, needs for help etc. To a great extent, cooperative learning meets students' needs, which motivate students to learn and develop students' autonomous learning.Cooperative learning (CL) has been a much-concerned innovation in educational field in the past thirty years. CL emphasizes interaction, learner autonomy and cooperative relationship. It has been proved to be a widespread effective method. There are many researches about cooperative learning and its relevant experiments in English language classroom. However, a great majority of the experiments focus on middle school and primary school English class. Limited studies are conducted on the application of cooperative learning in higher education English classroom, and very few implementations of CL in High Vocational College (HVC) English class. In the light of this, the author attempts to study the effectiveness of CL method in HVC English classroom.The author made a cooperative learning experiment lasting for one semester in Hubei Institute of Economics and Management. The subjects are two classes (total 100 students) of students majoring in Finance in Grade 2006. The author taught the two classes English. Most of the students in each class graduated from secondary schools, and the average scores of the two classes were almost the same. Through sampling, the author chose an experimental class (total 50 students) for CL study. While the other class was the control class, which was taught through the traditional teacher-centered format. The author divided he experimental class into twelve groups with 4 to 5 students per group. Each group was assigned a group leader, a secretary, a checker and a reporter, who respectively assume their corresponding responsibility. The classroom learning and teaching were primarily through the combination of student textbook Active English. The activities involved role-play, topic-discussion, learning English words cooperatively, listening cooperatively, translation cooperatively, and so forth. For the above activities, the author used a portfolio to record each student's performances. Besides, students were required to do self-evaluation and group evaluation every week, which were also included in student portfolio. According to the achievement provided in the portfolio, the teacher selected three excellent groups, which received extra bonus points, which were part of student semester score. The experimental result was investigated by three means: a questionnaire, interviews and a comparison of the final exam achievements between the two classes.The questionnaire was designed for the experimental class, which aimed to discover students' attitude towards cooperative learning, and the influence of CL on students. Through cooperative learning, a majority of students developed their autonomous learning and improved their ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation based on their original foundation. What's more, the reward (bonus points), as an effective method of assessment, motivated many students to achieve better. To enable students to reflect the experimental situations more authentically and confirm that cooperative learning is more effective for higher vocational college students than the traditional teaching model, the author arranged student leaders to interview the other students of both classes in small groups of 5. As the questionnaire demonstrated, the interview also showed the same advantages. The summary of the interview of the two classes demonstrated that, CL was superior to the traditional teaching model. The final exams of the two classes showed that the average score of the two classes were not high, however, through the experiment, the experimental class was much better than the control class in passing rate and excellence rate. This means CL is more effective to improve English teaching and learning quality.However, the existing problems of the experiment were conspicuous. Although many students acknowledged the assessment of portfolio, they felt it boring to do the same self- evaluation and group evaluation. So in the future research, the teacher needs to adjust the content of assessment. Besides, a part of students felt cooperative learning exerted too much pressure on them. The high achievers had to spend more time to help the low achievers but they themselves obtained no help from others. So the higher level students felt it unfair. Whereas, out of group responsibility, the low achievers were full of learning pressure. They thought CL deprived their freedom and they were forced to learn, though they benefited a little from cooperative learning.Generally speaking, CL can improve HVC English teaching and leaning efficiency in class. However, for most students were rather poor in English foundation and lacked learning autonomy, they still held a passive attitude towards learning. Cooperative Learning, to some extent, exerted a certain pressure on some of them. Therefore, in the future, we must take into account the humanistic factor and the particularity of the teaching objects. We can also infer from the perspective of high achievers, that CL is more suitable for students above medium levels, who are complementary to each other and it is expected to achieve more satisfactory result if applied to better colleges and universities.