A Study Of Cooperative Learning In English-writing Teaching In Junior High Schools

Cooperative Learning has been widely applied in the teaching these years. Cooperative Learning is a creative and effective teaching theory and strategy, which started in the United States of America in the 1970s and made practical improvement in the mid-1970s and 1980s. It is called the most needed and successful teaching revolution in the latest 10 years. It requires that teaching must be students-centered and group activities should be the basic teaching form, which enables students to develop their intiative and motivation to meet their needs of personal potential ability.The thesis inquires into the theories of cooperative learning and English-writing teaching. The former includes the appearance and development of cooperative learning, the intention and components of cooperative learning, the basic theories of cooperative learning, the relationship between English subject criterion and cooperative learning. The latter includes the importance of English-writing teaching ,the problems and causes of junior English-writing teaching, the basic theories of English-writing teaching and the relationship between the English subject criterion and English-writing teaching. And the fourth chapter introduces the patterns of English-writing teaching in the theories of cooperative learning. Compared with the traditional English-writing teaching pattern, cooperative learning makes clear about the features of English-writing teaching in the theories of cooperative learning.With the help of the theories of cooperative learning and English- writing teaching, I made an experiment about the cooperative leatrning in Enlgish writing. The fifth chapter of the thesis describes the experiment, which includes the meaning and purpose of the experiment , the expressions and design of the experiment, the preparation for the experiment and the procedures of the experiment, which includes two steps.At the preparation step, I got to know from a questionnaire that the students didn't understand the meaning of cooperative learning and have seldom experienced cooperative learning . By another questionnaire I found that students were generally not interested in English writing. A pre-experiment examination showed that the writing levels of the experimental class and the controlled class don't differ clearly. During the experiment, I kept lots of obsevation records of the English-writing teaching in the cooperative learning, and analysed the data I got in the experiment, which leads to the expected hypothesis conclusion.And the final chapter serves as a conclusion, in which some advantages of cooperative learning are specified, in the meantime, some problems of cooperative learning and some solutions to them are pointed out, and some prospects for cooperative learning are also included.In my follow-up research in the future, I will pay more attention to the way cooperative learning affects the students in terms of English learning and their emotional development, and the problems and solutions in order to make cooperative learning serve for English teaching better.