An Empirical Study Of Collaborative Learning In Higher Vocational-technical College English Teaching And Learning

Higher Vocational-technical Education is both the result of highlydeveloping economy of our country and the demand of more people forhigher education. The ever-increasing economic globalization is a fierceand intense challenge for Higher Vocational-technical Education,especially Higher Vocational-technical College (HVTC) English teachingand learning.Nowadays many HVTC graduates should be competent for theircareer, however, they are weak in the ability to use English. Therefore, itis urgent to improve English teaching and learning in HVTC. In order tomeet the needs of practical professionals in our society as well as todevelop their competence in the job market, it is necessary for us Englishteachers to explore a new way for HVTC in English teaching andlearning.With the further implementation of the open policy, helping our EFLlearners learn to cooperate well is one of the four biggest educationaltasks in the 21st century's education. The 21st century is one full ofcompetition and collaboration. Especially in this Information Age,without interaction and collaboration, any great invention is impossible.Therefore, the author of this thesis puts forward the idea of applyingcollaborative learning (CL) to HVTC English teaching and learning. A lotof scholars at home and abroad (Bruffee, K. A., 1993; Bosworth Kris,1994; Gokhale, A.A., 1996; Sharan, 1990, Panitz, 1997, Liqiao, 2003,Nanpo, 2003;) have focused CL on college and university classrooms, yet few have centered around CL in English teaching and learning ofHVTC, especially by means of experiment.Guided by the relevant CL theories, this thesis, centering around theHVTC English teaching reform and development, explores theoreticallyand empirically the feasibility of CL in HVTC English teaching andlearning.This thesis is a report of an experimental study of CL in HVTCEnglish teaching and learning. The experiment was done in two classeswith 37 people in each, one is the experimental group, the other thecontrol group, majoring in safety engineering in the EnvironmentalEngineering Department of the Changsha Environmental ProtectionVocational College. A teacher-centered traditional method and CLpedagogy were respectively applied in the control group and theexperimental group. In order to ensure the validity of the experiment, theauthor of this thesis carried out a comprehensive test a week before theexperiment began, and the author also designed two questionnaires beforeand after the experiment. Luckily, the results of the questionnaires and theexperimental data conformed to the hypotheses mentioned above.Due to the urgent time and small scale of this experiment, thegeneralization of CL in HVTC needs further study. However, we believethis study can provide a new perspective for the HVTC English teachingand learning model.