A Study On English Reading Teaching With Cooperative Learning By Means Of Task-Based Teaching In Higher Vocational Education

Higher Vocational Education (HVE) is an important component of higher education in our country. The English Curriculum Standard of HVE considers promoting the students' reading comprehension as one of the most important goals in English teaching. However, In EFL teaching of HVE, many teachers do not know much about the advanced teaching approach for lack of training and are still employing the traditional way of teaching in reading class, which does not benefit the students and is not an agreement with the Basic Requirements for HVE English Course.Task-based CL emphasizes the importance of education as a vehicle for teaching citizens to live cooperatively in a social democracy and teachers are not the only sources of knowledge and students should be able to help each other and learn in an interdependent way. Major reviews of cooperative learning research have shown that cooperative learning leads to common progress, higher academic achievement, better communication skills, increased motivation toward learning, higher self-esteem and self-confidence. The heart of cooperative learning is student-centered. Therefore, task-based CL can overcome the shortcomings in traditional teaching models, and the goal of improving reading comprehension can be achieved for the teachers of reading by realizing the mental process of reading comprehension and how prior knowledge can enhance a reader's interaction with the text through CL.This thesis consists of six parts. Part one briefly introduces the background and motivation of the study and the problems I attempt to settle; Part two reviews major studies on CL in and outside China; Part three is the key section of the thesis, which states the definition of cooperative learning, theories relevant to the present study, elements and models of cooperative learning, introduces the definition of the reading comprehension, three models in reading comprehension, shows the practice of CL in reading teaching in details and principles of designing reading task and so on; Part four introduces the hypotheses, subjects, instruments, procedures of the study and the analysis of the results of the study; Part five describes the process of the study, the data analysis and the result of the study; Part six draws the conclusion of the study, and points out the implications and limitations.