A Study Of Cooperative Learning To Encourage Students With Learning Difficulty To Progress In High School English Reading Class

Cooperative learning originated from America in the early 1970s.In our country systematic research on cooperative learning started at the end of the 1980s.Cooperative learning has become a classroom-instruction format that is widely used all over the world.However,because of students' uneven English levels,students with English learning difficulty can not really participate in cooperative learning.Most of these students have the sense of inferiority,so they are afraid to show themselves and unwilling to participate in the activities of cooperative learning.Learning difficulty is a universal phenomenon, which is an indisputable fact in the present high school English teaching and learning.In our country,the classroom is not only a main place where students learn English but also one of the places from which the students with English learning difficulty originate.Concerned over these problems mentioned above,this thesis,taking cooperative learning as an effective teaching model,tries studying the positive changing of students with English learning difficulty from one important part of classroom teaching--the reading class.The paper takes the zone of proximal development,the group dynamics and the need theory as its theoretical foundation,introduces the definition,the elements and the methods of cooperative learning,and then analyzes the feasibility of cooperative learning to help students with learning difficulty to progress in high school English reading class by expounding foreign language learning,high school English teaching and learning,English reading,students with learning difficulty and the relationship between them and cooperative learning respectively.Class 4 in Fuxing Middle School was selected as the experimental class,and Class 3 as the control class.Thirty students with English learning difficulty were selected from each class as the subjects with the hypothesis that cooperative learning could enhance their English learning motivation and improve their English learning achievement.In the first semester of 2008,quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis were conducted in the reading class by means of questionnaire,test and interview.Through data collection,analysis and discussion,the results of the research show that cooperative learning enhanced the English learning motivation of the students with learning difficulty and improved their English learning achievement.Admittedly,this experiment has its limitations.For example,it involved limited population and time;the subjects were not selected randomly;because the writing in students' English examination was not marked by computer,we could not assure ourselves that the marks the subjects got were absolutely fair.But we hope that the present research will be of help to the high school English teaching in China.