A Preliminary Study Of Vocabulary Teaching In Senior 2 Through Cooperative Learning

Vocabulary is to a language what bricks are to a building. It is an essential element of language learning. With a crowded curriculum, teachers of English are faced with the challenge of how to help students store and retrieve words in the target language in an effective way.This study attempts to develop an approach that is used in teaching vocabulary in class. Based on the literature review of the findings of vocabulary learning and acquisition, as well as a thorough investigation of cooperative learning, including its benefits, types and principles, the author of this thesis tries to prove that vocabulary teaching through cooperative learning in class has a positive effect on students' vocabulary performance.In the study, two Senior 2 classes in Tianjin No. 100 Senior Middle School were chosen as the subjects. In Class 11, the experimental class, vocabulary was taught through cooperative learning while in Class 13, the control class, traditional teaching method was used. Two vocabulary assessments were given before and after the experiment, and the data collected were analyzed with the Interdependent Samples Z-test. The result of the posttest shows there is a significant difference between the two groups. The experiment results indicate that cooperative learning used as a way to teach vocabulary in class can help students memorize vocabulary.