The Effects Of Cooperative Learning On Chinese College Learners' Use Of Oral Communicative Strategies

Strategic competence is an important element of communicative competence. The successful use of oral communicative strategies keeps the communication unblocked. At present, some researchers in China believe that strategy training is an essential way to improve and enforce learners' use of communication strategies in oral communication.However, strategy training is inadequate and unsystematic to some extent. No one can tell others how to learn a foreign language without really trying. Compared with the strategy training, cooperative learning is a more systematic way to improve learners' oral communication strategies, to teach the learners to communicate genuinely, spontaneously and meaningfully. It can promote the learners' active learning, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the relationship between oral communicative strategies and cooperative learning. Under the general purpose, seven quantitative and qualitative research questions are raised to see how cooperative learning might be helpful to the development of students' communicative strategic competence of oral English.The study takes place in Dalian University of Technology within 90 subjects. Participates are drawn from second year students. Ongoing cooperative learning, as the research intervention, is implemented in the oral English classroom.All data are collected from questionnaires, interviews with students, the researcher's class observation and students' self-reports. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire has been assured. The data from the questionnaires are calculated in SPSS16.0 analysis system to show the significant changes between pre-questionnaire test and post-questionnaire test after the intervention of cooperative learning in the class. The thesis presents both quantitative and qualitative data analysis.The analysis results of the oral communicative strategies questionnaire show that after the implementation of cooperative learning, significant changes have taken on the frequency of students' use of positive communication strategies and students' use of some negative communication strategies.Data analysis results from the cooperative learning questionnaire indicate that cooperative learning is effective to enhance the learners' interest and self-confidence. It also lowers students' anxiety. Besides, Chinese college learners have a positive attitude to cooperative learning.As for the qualitative data analysis results, the major findings are that, great changes have taken place on the subjects' awareness of the strategy employment, the subjects' personality and their language proficiency.In summary, cooperative learning is an effective way to improve the college students' use of oral communicative strategies. It is true that there are some limitations in this research, and more insights should be provided into the study of the effects of cooperative learning to oral communicative strategies.