On Feasibility Of Cooperative Learning (the CL) In Large English Classes Of Secondary Vocational School

Cooperative Learning (the CL), which is based on the theories of modern social psychology, educational sociology and cognitive psychology, makes full use of the dynamic elements in class and takes group work as its basic form. The group members will negotiate to accomplish the common tasks assigned by the teacher, who will make assessments on the groups' achievements and guide them to fulfill the teaching goal in a cooperative way.Owing to the enlargement of recruitment and the lack of teaching facilities in the secondary vocational school (SVS), large-class English teaching is an inevitable trend. Faced with the students with poor discipline and low achievement, teachers normally feel that it is impossible to provide such a large number of students with opportunities to interact in English between teacher and students, or amongst students during the limited time of class teaching. Therefore, the traditional whole-class approaches remain as the strategy to solve the problem caused by large classes, and thus English is still taught as a kind of knowledge but not as a communicative tool, which is a serious deviation from the basic rule of language teaching. Meanwhile the CL, preferred by many experts in small class settings, is rejected in large class teaching.This thesis ventures to propose that the CL can be applied to large English classes as long as an appropriate strategy is taken. Therefore, the author hypothesizes that it is feasible to apply the CL to large English classes in SVS. The author conducts an 18-week long experiment in a certain SVS where he serves as an English teacher. The analysis of the data shows that the CL applied to large English classes is effective in improving students' English competence, especially in oral English.At the same time, the author is also well aware of the three limitations of the research, and this being the case, he believes that he has in fact raised problems to be further looked into other than provided solutions to the problems of large English class teaching.