Cooperative Learning And College English Listening Teaching

The latest College English Curriculum Requirements (2004) has put forward teaching reform: the former core of teaching– which used to be reading– has started to include listening and speaking, in order to enhance students'comprehensive and communicative capability. With the increasing depth of China's opening to the world, it is harder for traditional teaching approach to meet the demand of social development; while Cooperative Learning method, which improves the intercommunication of students, seems to be more suitable for nowadays.Since the 1970s, Cooperative Learning has become a pervasive educational approach in the United States (Wang, 2002). Nowadays, Cooperative Learning has been a theoretical and strategic system applied by many countries in the world.Based on the literature review of Cooperative Learning, and with the purpose to develop students'communicative competence, the author has designed properly to apply Cooperative Learning in the teaching of listening– so as to remove the dull class atmosphere and encourage student involvement in class, which may be problems in the traditional English listening class.Depending on CL theory, the author employs experiment to explore the effectiveness of Cooperative Learning in English listening class. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis on test scores, questionnaires and interview, the findings indicate that, after the treatment of a period, Cooperative Learning is helpful for the improvement of class atmosphere, the enhancement of students'involvement in class, and promoting students'listening ability by integrating speaking and listening with more communication in class. The research has proved the effectiveness of carrying out Cooperative Learning approach in English listening teaching in China.