On Senior English Classroom Group Interaction

After the new curriculum criterion of English was issued and implemented, English learning methods appear to be more and more varied. The forms of classroom organization, to a certain extent, have also been diversified.The newly-published textbooks for Senior Middle School have come into use with projecting characteristics of the present educational situations. The textbooks have been revised several times and attached great importance to developing the students' humanistic accomplishment. They aim to help students to construct a system of knowledge, elevate their status as the subject and to initiate their creative capability.The present study focuses on the group interaction in Senior English classroom instruction. A large quantity of materials have been collected and closely studied. Special attention is paid to the theories of humanism and interactionism, on the basis of which, the hypothesis that group interaction may improve students learning achievement is posed. A one-term experiment was carried out from the autumn of the year 2003 to January of the year 2004. Grounded on the abundant literature of the previous research , a series of group activities such as the game "Time Channel" and a mixed model of pair work and group work are worked out to achieve the god. Centered on the teaching of "speaking' part in SBIA, the activities adopted here were mainly performed in learning "speaking" part of the textbook for Senior Grade 1 students. To go step further, the experimental group learning methods were also used in the whole teaching procedures to foster students' abilities of the four basic language skills.The outcome of the experiment shows that the score increase range of the experimental group in the 3 exams was sharply elevated compared with that of the controlled group. Therefore, the hypothesis was proved to be feasible and valid.The entire thesis is composed of 6 sections. Section 1 touches upon the purpose and significance of the present research at the perspective of the acknowledgement of the present classroom teaching conditions. Moreover, the key items like interaction, group work and cooperative learning are distinctly defined. Section 2 deals with the literature review both at home and abroad. Starting with an exploration into the theories of "humanism and interactionism" advocated by Maslow, Rogers and Vygotsky, this part delves into the literature on student-student interaction both theoretically and practically.As for the domestic previous studies on group interaction, emphasis is put on the classroomteaching reform and experiments performed in Shangdong and Zhejiang. The thesis elaborates the ready-made achievements through group learning. The third part states the rationale and introduces several practical teaching models, which have been indigenized in Chinese Schools.Section 4 is about the experiment, the heart of the whole research. It includes the hypothesis, the subjects, instruments and the procedures. Before the experiment, a 4-level questionnaire was distributed to the subjects, 109 students of the two senior Grade 1 classes in No. 1 Middle School of Tianshui, of which 105 valid copies were collected and analyzed. The results forcefully proved that the presupposition of the experiment was ascertained. That is, there is no difference between the knowledge levels of the two groups of subjects. For classroom experiment, a series of valuable, practical and creative group learning activities were designed and implemented in order to fully activate students' participation and collaboration. The instrument used as the pretest was the entrance exam for all the junior middle school students of Gansu Province. Later, another 3 exams were given to the subjects with a 5-week interval in between. All the three exam papers were set with a comparatively higher validity and effectiveness, of which the last was served as the post-test.Section 5 is assigned to data processing and discussion. A group statistics and an independent samples test are made to testify that the two groups, the experimental and t...