A Study On Application Of Group Work In English Writing Teaching For Vocational College Students

Teaching English writing for non-English majors college students, especially those vocational college students, has long been a big problem to English teachers. Students are uninterested in English writing. They assume English writing difficult and boring. Moreover, their compositions are illogical, ambiguous and incomprehensible and full of mistakes. However, the importance of English writing can never be exaggerated. Writing can be served as an essential tool for communication among people all over the world in their daily life and work, for example, to send personal or business email. In other words, English writing makes the interaction and the flow of knowledge and information possible and smooth. The growing importance of English writing and the problems existing in English writing teaching for vocational college students call for a new effective and feasible writing teaching method to take place of the traditional teacher-centered, students' interest-drained instruction. Furthermore, the New Curriculum strongly advocates cooperative learning by expressing that "Encourage cooperative learning, promote exchanges among students, develop together and enhance teaching and learning." In this sense, Group Work (GW), one of an effective cooperative learning method, serves well to arouse students'initiative in writing, promote critical thinking and improve students'writing competence.GW has solid theoretical bases. Cognitive theory such as Vogostky's ZPD and Jean Piaget's development theory, Krashen's Hypotheses and Swain's Output and Interactive theory, Hymes's Communicative Competence as well as Canale and Swain's Communicative Competence all serve as GW's theoretic supports. On the basis of these theories, a 10-week one- semester teaching experiment is taken among two classes of one-year students majoring in E-commerce in Wuhan Technical Colleges with one as the experimental class while the other the control class. GW is applied to the experimental class. During the experiment process pre-test writing, post-test writing, pre-test questionnaire and post-test questionnaire are used in both two classes.In this paper, the experiment aims to explore whether GW, one of an effective cooperative learning method, will make students feel less difficult in writing and improve their writing ability so that it can offer some useful pedagogical implications for English writing teaching in China. The results of the Paired Samples T Test on Scores of Students'English Writing for ECPRET & ECPOST shows that there is great significant difference in the EC scores of students'English writing between the pre-test and the post-test and that the students in EC have made greater strides. The result of the Independent Samples T Test shows that there is great significance difference between the EC and CC on writing scores after given different teaching methods. The result of the questionnaire shows that a majority of subjects (68.33%) regards GW as effective and plausible in English writing teaching and play a major role in creating a favorable learning atmosphere, promoting the information exchanges and improving learning strategies. The overall analyses of statistics collected from tests and questionnaires indicate that the Group Work is effective in English writing teaching in vocational colleges.