Web-based Cooperative Learning For EFL

In recent years, information and communication technologies, in particular, multimedia technology, have increasingly changed for the better the situation in our educational field. The integration of information and communication technologies into teaching and learning has been popular all these years. While obviously, we should not believe that the integration means teachers being replaced by technology or the machines being the donator of the classroom activities. The integration should be an innovation in the way to learn under the guidance of constructivism. In a constructivist classroom, the students become the subjects to deal with information and construct their own knowledge, instead of remaining the passive receivers of new information. The teachers also switch their roles from the providers of knowledge to an assistant and enhancer of students while they construct their knowledge. We can see that it means a great change in teaching and learning and it means a change in mode of teaching and learning. Constructivism should be the guidance and basic of the construction of a new kind of teaching mode. As people know more and more about teaching and learning, cooperative learning has arrested many people's attention. Results of many researches show that cooperative learning is a vivid theory in language teaching and learning. A web-based cooperative EFL is the result of integration of the two theories. It should be a new kind of cooperative learning integrated with information and communication theory under theguidance of constructivism. In this essay, the writer tries to construct a new mode of web-based cooperative EFL.