An Action Research On Cooperative Learning In Middle School English Teaching

Modern society is highly competitive, but people have started to realize the importance of cooperation since it is part of human qualities for survival and development for modern life. Cooperative Learning has become a popular theory and practice in the past decade. This kind of learning is mainly based on these theories: the Cognitive Elaboration Theory, the Motivational Theory and the Social Interdependence Theory. Cooperative Learning emphasizes that learners should participate learning process actively and interactively and construct their knowledge with the help of each other.During the school year 2004-2005,1 conducted an action research in my English classes. The research is aimed to explore two aspects of Cooperative Learning as below: its feasibility in my school; its effect on changing learning behavior, attitude, cooperative awareness and ability. I organized twelve groups in my class according to the principle of "intra-group heterogeneousness and inter-group homogeneousness". And I tried to cultivate their collaborative awareness and ensure that students are taught the interpersonal skills. The key factor is the task-design, which is in such a way that each group member should realize that he is to contribute to the task completion and to assist others. Through the action research and data collection, the research achieved the predicted results, which showed that Cooperative Learning is feasible and effective when applied to middle school English teaching. It makes students experience the happiness of cooperation and the satisfaction of the achievement of group-oriented goals. Cooperative Learning also raises the interest of students and improves their learning results. Their cooperative awareness and ability is also improved. Besides, I, as the teacher and action researcher, benefit a lot in this process.