A Study On The Effectiveness Of Autonomous-Cooperative Learning In Freshmen College English Reading And Writing Teaching

College English Curriculum Requirements was issued by the Ministry of Education in 2007, and it points out that the objective of college English teaching is to develop students'comprehensive competence in using English, at the same time to enhance their self-learning ability so as to meet the needs of China's social development and international exchanges. However, autonomous learning is not equal to independent learning, and cooperative learning ability is also among the basic demands for today's college students. Constructivism which is originated from Piaget's cognitive development theory and Vygotsky's social interaction theory has influenced English teaching and learning greatly. Constructivism holds that knowledge is acquired by learners through cooperation with others in a certain situation, namely, in the social cultural context, and learning is a meaning construction process. Based on this theory, the writer attempts to combine autonomous learning and cooperative learning to form a new teaching method: Autonomous-Cooperative Learning. In order to test the effectiveness of this teaching method, the writer applied it to College English reading and writing teaching, and conducted a one-semester empirical experiment.The research subjects were 120 non-English major freshmen of Zhengzhou University. They were divided into two classes evenly, that is, the experimental class and the control class. The experimental class adopted the Autonomous-Cooperative Learning teaching method while the control class adopted the traditional teaching method. The two classes were basically similar in the aspects of the students'number, their average age, sex ratio, the textbook, the teacher and the number of English classes. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used and research instruments include questionnaires, English achievement tests, classroom observations and interviews. It was seen through classroom observations and interviews that this teaching method was generally welcomed by students in the experimental class, and they participated actively in the classroom activities and the classroom atmosphere was lively; it was known after comparisons of the two questionnaires that the autonomous learning ability of the students in the experimental class has been promoted, especially in motivation, strategy-using and time-management; and the average English scores of the experimental class in the post-test were higher than that of the control class, which showed that this teaching method could improve students'English academic achievement.The one-semester teaching experiment proved that Autonomous-Cooperative Learning was effective. But due to some subjective and objective factors, the experiment still has some limitations. The writer suggests that longer experimental time and an effective monitoring mechanism be taken in further study.