Application Of Cooperative Learning Into The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior Middle School

Cooperative learning is a theoretic and strategic system applied by many countries in the world. Cooperative learning is a kind of learning that students in groups of two or six people are all engaged in various study activities, which need cooperation and mutual support. It emphasizes the learner-centered class, in which the teacher plays a combined role of organizer, director, helper, supervisor and facilitator, attempts to enhance teacher-student and student-student interactions and promotes students to learn sufficiently and improve the qualities and benefits of English teacher.Nowadays English writing is playing a more and more important role in international communication and cooperation. However, teachers often do not attach much importance to English writing in our school education. As a result, many serious problems exist in the current teaching of English writing. Considering the demands for reforms in our nation's educational field, the author thinks it essential to reform traditional writing teaching approaches. The author tries to combine cooperative learning with the teaching of English writing in order to further confirm that cooperative learning is more effective in teaching English writing in Chinese middle schools. Cooperative learning follows the procedure of assigning writing tasks→group discussion→cooperative writing→peer editing→teacher commenting.In the step of assigning writing tasks, the teacher introduces the writing task and makes sure the students are familiar with the writing content and requirements. The leader of the group organizes the discussion; the students exchange and brainstorm ideas; next the recorder writes down all of the ideas, and then good ideas and expressions will be shared by all the class. Then comes the next step—cooperative writing. Group members are supposed to write a draft in pairs, and each group two articles. Peer editing occurs between group members, among groups and in the whole class. In the step of teacher commenting, the teacher makes a short summary, praising the groups for their high marks, great progress, good points, neat organization or good cooperation. The teacher also points out the common errors. In this way, each student will write cooperatively for himself of herself and their group, and it can improve each member's writing ability and enable students to work cooperatively so that the students will learn to know, learn to be and learn to live together, which is also the goal of education for the 21st century.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is Introduction. After introducing the importance of English, this chapter shows the problems existing in the teaching of English writing in China. Chapter Two is Literature Review. This chapter briefly introduces what is cooperative learning and relevant theories and compares cooperative learning with traditional teaching methods. Chapter Three is Methodology. Procedures of this experiment are presented in details. Chapter Four is Results and Discussion. The author analyzes the result of pre-test, mid-test and post-test and two questionnaires, using Excel 2003 software and the computer. The results suggest that the scores of the post-test of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class. The advantages of cooperative learning are also shown in this chapter. Chapter Five is Conclusion. A conclusion is drawn from the study that cooperative learning has effects on improving students′English writing. Owing to the limitations of the study, there still remain many practical problems, which call for teachers′and researchers′attention and endeavor for further research so that more effective methods will be found out for teaching of English writing in the future...