An Empirical Study Of Heterogeneous Cooperative English Learning In The Initial Stage Of Senior Middle Schools

Within the current school system, the junior high school and senior high school are two relatively independent systems in most parts of China, which respectively have their own teaching goals and syllabus requirements. As far as our Shandong province is concerned, there is a phenomenon that the junior high school and senior high school are using different teaching materials published by different presses, and the teachers are lacking in contact and communication. After the students enter high school, they not only have had a certain foundation in English study, but also have formed their own learning strategies, study habits and the relative stability of the emotional attitude. However, the differences in the characteristics of English learning make it difficult for the senior high students who have got used to the junior high teaching methods to adapt to the new teaching methods. Through the interviews with some of the students, I have found that students who are from different schools and of different gender and characters have showed a significant difference in adapting to the new senior high school teaching methods soon after they entered the school.Aiming at dealing with this phenomenon, I proposed the assumption of Heterogeneous Cooperative Groups classified by gender, graduate school, and personality characteristics in the initial stages of their high school English study. With the assistance of my colleagues, I implemented an experimental study to two classes of Grade 2010 in our school,Zibo Experimental High School. Through questionnaires and the analysis of English enrollment grade of the students who are of different gender and different character traits by SPSS17.0, as well as the analysis of the Independent Samples-Test of the first English test results and the ANOVA of students who graduated from different schools, I have found that as a whole, there are indeed differences in the adaptation for different types of students. In the experiment, the students were divided in accordance with the above characteristics of heterogeneous grouping. After a period of three-month cooperative learning, through the pre-test and post-test analysis, compared with the ordinary classes, in such aspects as meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and communitive strategies, I have found that the cooperative learning heterogeneous group can effectively curb the differentiation of students'achievement and can improve their learning strategies.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One summarizes the definition of the concept—Cooperative Learning proposed by domestic and foreign scholars, as well as the five elements and five basic types of Cooperative Learning. Chapter Two introduces several basic theoretical principles of cooperative learning: Vygotsky's Developmental Theories, Krashen's Input Hypothesis, Glasser's Choice Theory, Motivational Theory, Cognitive Elaboration Theory and Lewin's Group Dynamics Theory. Chapter Three mainly discusses the research methods including the design and its implementation Chapter Four is the study result and its analysis. Chapter Five includes the findings of the study, the inspiration on teaching and its research limitations.