Cooperative Learning Applied In Cultivating And Developing Vocational School Students' Autonomous Learning: An Empirical Study

Cooperative Learning is one of the most popular teaching methods in the recent two decades, and many related researches have proved its advantages brought to English teaching. And it is the same with Autonomous Learning. However, most of the researches are concerned with the English teaching in the middle schools or colleges. Few of them put emphasis on the English teaching in vocational schools. As a matter of fact, this field needs more attention. The thesis takes English teaching in vocational schools as the study subject and carries out an empirical study about the promotion that cooperative learning brings to students' autonomous learning motivation and strategies.Before the experiment, the thesis explores the potential relation between Cooperative Learning and Autonomous Learning and analyzes the current situation of learning motivation and strategies of the vocational school students. During the practice teaching, the cooperative learning was used to promote students'autonomous learning motivation, strategies and abilities as well. Two parallel classes from the national key vocational school, Changsha Electron Industry School, participated in the experiment and one is the empirical class, the other is the controlled class. The empirical class used cooperative learning while the controlled class was taught in an ordinary way. The one-term experiment was supposed to answer the following questions.1. Whether the Cooperative Learning helps to improve the motivation of autonomous learning of vocational school students?2. Whether the Cooperative Learning is advantageous to improve the strategies of autonomous learning of vocational school students?3. Whether the Cooperative Learning is advantageous to improve students'autonomous learning abilities?The results of the experiment showed students'autonomous learning motivation, strategies and abilities improved. In about 22 items about learning motivation,13 of them improved; in about 22 items about the learning strategies,12 of them improved. The school records of the experiment class improved obviously. These prove that the Cooperative Learning is helpful to improve the autonomous learning motivation, strategies and abilities of vocational school students.