Cooperative Learning: An Effective Approach In The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior Middle School

Nowadays, English writing is playing a more and more important role in international communication and cooperation. However, in China, we always do not attach much weight to English writing in our school education. Thus, many serious problems exist in the current teaching of English writing. Based on the belief that cooperative learning is more effective than traditional approaches in English writing classroom, the author introduces the cooperative learning into the English writing classroom in Senior Middle School.Cooperative learning, as a new teaching theory and model, is widely applied by many countries in the world. It is a kind of pedagogical strategic system promoted by Slavin, Johnson et al in the 1970s in America, which encourages students to perform all kinds of learning activities in group or small team, emphasizes the learner-centered class, in which the teacher plays a role of director, cooperator, supervisor, attempts to enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions and promotes students to learn sufficiently, enables students to work cooperatively. In cooperative learning students help each other to study some materials and can be rewarded for the achievements or performance of the entire group. Rewarding the group for the achievements of every group members reduces the pressure on the students and enhances students' initiative to finish assignments.The study mainly based on Vygotsky's developmental theory and its related theories serves as the main theoretical basis for the study of cooperative learning in English writing. The study tries to verify whether cooperative learning in English writing has any effects on raising students' scores. Cooperative learning experiment was conducted from September 2005 to February 2006. The subjects are Senior 3 students from two classes in Linchuan No. 1 Middle School of Jiangxi. They are randomly selected by computers. The experimental group and the control group have respectively 76 students. The data are collected through English writing tests (pre-test and pos-test), questionnaires, interviews, and observation of class.This paper is composed of six parts. The first part introduces the existing situation of teaching English writing in China and the purpose of the present study. The second part talks about literature review, including the concept, the essential components, the...