The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Teaching In Military Academies

Both the strategic goal of cultivating high-quality army officers for PLA and modern warfare situations require that Chinese military academies produce people armed with a good command of English. Unfortunately, the college English teaching mode and instructional methods followed in the military academies are too outmoded to facilitate the production of such demanded personnel. So to address the problems of college English teaching in military academies the paper proposes cooperative learning in the context of military academies.Cooperative learning is a modern language teaching theory and learning strategy adopted the world over and has been proved to be very successful. The point of it is that students learn by cooperation and learn how to cooperate in the course of learning. The study applies the concept of cooperative learning to college English teaching practice in military academies and put forward the mode to be adopted in the military academy with its own characteristics.The present thesis aims at exploring whether the proposed mode in question can improve the cadets' academic performance, and at the same time, motivate them to learn, and help enhance their cognitive, teamwork and social skills, thus laying a solid foundation for their future work and development.This paper seeks to make breakthroughs and innovations in the following three aspects:(1) In connection with the special system of teaching management of military academies and on the basis of student-student interaction and teacher-student interaction, another dimension is added, i.e. introducing the interaction between the English instructors and the administrators(the company leaders in charge) as an important factor into cooperative learning practice in the context of military academies;(2) Cooperative learning is extended beyond the classroom(from inside the class to outside the class) as the uniform schedule of military administration is conducive to conducting such practice, which helps develop learning autonomy in the cadets;(3) A new version of grouping in cooperative learning is proposed in terms of the composition and size of the cadets companies in military academies.Two natural parallel classes are chosen for the experiment: one is the experimental group; the other is the control group. The methods used in the experiment consist of questionnaires, interviews and data analyses. The experiment was conducted for three academic semesters. The inspiring outcomes from the study prove that cooperative learning is an effective way in English teaching in military academies.