A Study Of The Application Of Cooperative Learning Theory In Business English Negotiation Classes

Business English Negotiation is a course of English for Special Purpose, whose teaching objective is to cultivate students'speaking ability negotiating skills by using English under foreign business environment. And this course requires teaching theory that can practice their communication ability and negotiation skills as much as possible. However, presently, the teaching method many teachers adopt can not fulfill the teaching objective of Business English Negotiation course.Therefore, a different teaching theory should be sought to guide the current teaching. Among the most widely applied teaching theories, Cooperative learning theory attracts the author's attention. Cooperative learning became popular in America in 60-70s of 20th century and later was adopted widely all over the world in colleges, middle schools and primary schools etc. Researches on cooperative learning demonstrated"overwhelmingly positive"results include: better academic gains, improved communicative ability and enhanced cooperative spirit and so on. Therefore, there is great point in applying this theory in Business English Negotiation classes. And it is assumed that it can fulfill the teaching objective of this course.As it is difficult to measure the improvement of negotiating skills, we focus on the communicative ability improvement of students in this research. Actually, the 11 oral fluency indices this research adopted can comprehensively explain students'communicative ability: fluency, accuracy, sentence complexity and logic.The author conducted an empirical research into the oral fluency level of two classes of students in International Business Major in Shandong Agricultural Administrators'College. From one index of the research, Ratio of Error- free T-units, oral accuracy level can also be reflected. There were 16 females and 16 males in experimental class and 16 females and 14 males in control class(altogether 62, 30males and 32 females). At first, a pretest was done at the beginning of the semester to compare the oral fluency level of control class and experimental class. And a posttest was carried out after experimental class applying cooperative learning and control class using traditional teaching methods for 34 periods of classes respectively to compare their improvement of oral fluency level. During this process, students in experimental class were divided into 8 heterosexual groups and 8 homosexual groups. And the oral fluency indices of heterosexual groups and homosexual groups were collected and compared. This is to compare the effectiveness of heterosexual grouping and homosexual grouping. The results are as follows:1. Compared with traditional teaching method, cooperative learning theory-directed teaching method is more effective in improving students'oral fluency level because cooperative learning can provide students with more chances of communication and motivate them to take part in learning process more actively.2. Compared with homosexual grouping, heterosexual grouping is better in improving students'oral fluency level. In our research, the eight heterosexual groups achieved better results in 5 out of the 11 oral fluency indices and the other 6 indices are at the same level with homosexual groups. Therefore, there is no difficulty in understanding the better performance of heterosexual groups than homosexual groups.3. Another result we obtain is that memorizing stereotyped expressions and sentences (formulaic language) do a lot help to improve students'oral accuracy. There are many formulaic expressions in Business English Negotiation course, and students can achieve proficiency after repetition and practice of them.In short, compared with traditional teaching method, cooperative learning theory-directed teaching method is more effective to improve students'oral fluency—communicative ability, one of the major teaching objectives of Business English Negotiation. Furthermore, when applying cooperative learning, heterosexual grouping is better than homosexual grouping in improving subjects'oral fluency level.