Cooperative Learning Is Applied In The English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

Cooperative learning (CL)is a teaching and learning strategy that makes learners cooperatively involved in learning in groups. Nowadays, competition among students is overstressed. As a result, cooperation is neglected. Students form a sense of competition which is distorted, and correspondingly, they have developed a self-centered behavior. They base their own successes on others'failure, lacking in a sense of cooperation, the basic function of which is to get along and communicate with others. Consequently, they need to behave in the interest of both themselves and others. This condition doesn't meet the requirement of the information age, which needs the sense of cooperation and social communication skills. The researches and experiments of cooperative learning, which have been conducted in the Western countries in recent years, are active response to the above problems. During cooperative learning activities, a group of students create an environment where they are actively engaged in the learning activities by sharing insights and ideas, providing feedback, and supporting assistance to one another. Major reviews of cooperative learning research have shown that cooperative learning leads to common progress, higher academic achievement, better communication skills, increased motivation toward learning, higher self-esteem and self-confidence. The heart of cooperative learning is students to be good "actors". It emphasizes the student-centered class, in which the teacher plays a role of director and cooperator, and attempts to enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions.It is very important to train students' reading ability, thus reading has become one of the most important parts of English teaching in senior high school. But it is a pity that our English reading instruction is far from being satisfactory. In order to transform the traditional teaching method of reading and find a more effective way of teaching and learning, the author suggests the cooperative learning (CL) approach be applied to the reading instruction. On the basis of previous theoretic researches, the author conducted an experiment on the teaching of English reading, the aim of which is to verify the active function of the cooperative learning in improving students'English reading.