A Study On The Application Of Group Cooperation To The College English Writing Teaching Of English Majors In China

This study aims to examine the effects of Cooperative Learning (CL) on the teaching of college English writing in the pattern of 'group cooperation' to some Chinese learners of English in China, and to try to probe into the factors that may contribute to the effectiveness of group-cooperative writing in Chinese EFL context.The study consists of three steps. The first one is quantitative study, designing a quasi-experiment to test the effectiveness of group cooperation on teaching college English writing to some Chinese learners of English in China; the second and third steps are qualitative study, using a 5-point scale student questionnaire and conducting a post-test reflective interview to the students of the intervention group to find out the factors that may affect the effectiveness of group-cooperative writing in Chinese EFL context. The quasi-experiment was conducted in the second semester of 2006-2007 in the School of English Studies of Tianjin Foreign Studies University (TFSU). Participants in this study are 49 sophomore English-majors from two classes. One of the classes is randomly appointed as the intervention group (N=25) and the other as the non-intervention group (N=24). The writer of this thesis uses SPSS 13.0 software package to do statistical and data analysis work. An Mp3 is used to record the information of the interview and then the message is transcribed into the written form to be further analyzed.After 18 weeks, the statistical analysis of the quasi-experimental study in the posttest showed no significant difference between the students of the intervention group and the non-intervention group. However, the mean difference between the two groups in the posttest was much higher than that in the pretest, which implies that the students who conducted cooperative writing activities made much more progress in improving their writing skills than the students in the non-CL group. Based on the results and findings of this study and through the analysis of the student questionnaire and the feedback of the interview, the writer summarizes some advantages and lists some problems of the application of CL to the college English writing teaching in China, provides some solutions to the problems, and makes some recommendations for future research.