Application Of Group Cooperative Learning Approach To English Writing Class Of Senior High School

In New Curriculum Standards(2003) learning strategies are regarded as the preconditions of improving learning efficiency and autonomous ability.Cooperative learning theory and strategies,which started in America in the 1970s and made practical improvement in the 1980s have been generally accepted in many countries,are creative and effective to cultivate and train students' language using and autonomous learning abilities.It requires that teaching should be students-centered and group activities should be the basic teaching form,which enable to develop their initiative and motivation to meet their needs of personal potential ability.The core of cooperative teaching is making students accomplish a mutual goal via group work.Based on the cooperative learning theory and the real current situation of English writing in our school,using the former research achievement for reference,the author has applied the Group Cooperative Learning strategy to teaching English writing in a senior school and adopted group writing for a further confirmation that the approach is more practical and effective than traditional teaching ones in teaching English writing in our school.The questions of the study are about as follows:(1) Can group writing help to alleviate students' anxiety and make them interested and active in writing process?(2) Can Cooperative Learning Approach cultivate students' autonomous learning ability and cooperative awareness?(3) Whether CLA is more effective than traditional approaches in improving the students' writing competence and scores?The thesis tries to be validated by means of carrying out writing experiments in two contrast classes(one class was taken in cooperative learning approach and the other was taken in traditional approach) in Grade Two in Yunhe High School of Tongzhou District for 16 weeks(from February to June) in 2008.The thesis inquires into the theories of cooperative learning and English- writing teaching.The former includes the intention and components of cooperative learning,the basic theories of cooperative learning,the English curriculum standards and the present situation of cooperative learning.The latter includes the nature,character and role of English writing,and English writing requirement.Then,the thesis looks into the function and importance of applying the theory of cooperative learning to teaching English writing in a senior high school.The experiment mainly consists of four parts:preparation,design,implement,and result conclusion.The experiment is focus on group work designing,group work implementing and group work evaluating.In addition,it has discussed,with examples, the merits and demerits of group work and traditional approaches,come up with concrete measures for improvement to further promote high school English teaching reforms.The result from the experiments shows the experimental class who took in cooperative learning model has made more progress in writing interest,passion,skills and ability than the comparative class.This indicates that Cooperative Learning in group model can arouse the students' interest and improve the teaching efficiency in writing class.The analysis of the experimental results and discussions show the limitation and weakness of the group writing with cooperative learning approach.There is still some space to be filled and improved in the future English writing class.