On The Strategies Of Cooperative Learning In English Culture Teaching In Middle School

With the rapid development of modern communications system and transportation, interpersonal and intercultural communication will greatly increase. People from different countries will encounter new cultures at a greater rate than before. The whole world has become a "small village". But when people communicate interculturally, they find only knowing the target language cannot solve all the communicative problems. Different cultures will bring about different ways of life, different principles and taboo of communication, which will often result in misunderstandings, even barriers in intercultural communication. Then how to avoid and overcome these communication barriers caused by cultural differences? More and more people are aware of the importance of the teaching of culture in foreign language teaching (FLT). FLT not only helps students to master the knowledge of language, such as grammar and vocabulary, but also helps students to grasp the target culture, develop intercultural communicative competence and use language appropriately to communicate effectively.This thesis tends to analyze the relationship between language, culture and communication, to introduce an advanced and effective learning strategy in English culture teaching - cooperative learning, whichoriginated in the U.S.A and now is widely used in many countries. It analyzes not only the theoretical basis of cooperative learning from goal structure theory and development theory but also the psychological basis involving affective and cognitive aspects, then applies the activities of cooperative learning, such as role-playing, drama, jigsaw, discussion, group-games-tournament etc.to English language and culture teaching and achieves great success.Through an experiment, it is verified that the strategy of cooperative learning can greatly help students to master the target culture and rapidly develop the students' intercultural communicative competence, and the traditional teacher centered method is not suitable for target culture teaching and learning any more, instead, cooperative learning, a learner-based teaching approach, is more effective.