Cooperative Learning And Its Implementation In Higher Vocational And Technical College English Classroom

In China, we vigorously develop Higher Vocational and Technical College education. This is not only the needs of the rapid development of economy, but also more and more people access to higher education. With the development of global economy, English, as a tool of communication, becomes quite important nowadays. Therefore, we should enlighten the English teaching of Higher Vocational and Technical College. However, the level of student in the Higher Vocational and Technical College can not meet the needs in some kinds of fields, especially the ability of communication.This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of the implementation of cooperative learning in Higher Vocational and Technical College, to activate students'interest in English learning, to improve students'autonomous learning, cooperative abilities and comprehensive abilities of English and to promote the English teaching and learning quality of Higher Vocational and Technical College.Based on a review of definition, basic elements, characteristics of CL and a discussion of its underlying theories, the study manages to clarify why and how cooperative learning facilitates foreign language teaching and learning by the analysis of quantitative data and the qualitative data. The study involves one Experimental Group, which is exposed to CL instruction, and one Control Group receiving the traditional method. All the participants are students of Grade 2010 with intermediate and under-intermediate English level from Hebei Engineering and Technical College.The course of the study: 1. through a questionnaire survey to identify students'problems in English language learning and make students learn to understand the degree of cooperation. 2. Through the class observation, the author implements the cooperative learning in English class and fosters the students'cooperation awareness. The specific problems encountered in the implementation of cooperative learning should be immediately resolved by interviewing the students after school. 3. After 19 weeks of practical activities, the author knows the students'reflection to the method and the problems of the implementation process by interviewing students in the cooperative learning methods. 4. After collecting the data of the pretest and posttest, the author analyzes the data by using SPSS and approves whether there are differences between the cooperative learning method and the traditional teaching method by the independent samples t-test.The following conclusions are drawn through the analysis of application of cooperative learning in the English class and the analysis of related data from the experiment:(1) Compared with the Control Group, students'English proficiency in the Experimental Group improved whereas the level of the Control Group did not. Therefore, cooperative learning has positive effects on improving the learners'English proficiency.(2) Students in the Experimental Group had a better attitude towards English learning and were more active to express their ideas and get feedbacks from the peers. Besides, the atmosphere in the Experimental Group was more relaxing.(3) Students in the Experimental Group acknowledged that they enjoyed the atmosphere and benefited quite a lot from the positive interaction and relationship with their classmates and the teacher.(4) Cooperative learning can advocate students'awareness of cooperation and the cooperative skills.Based on the findings from the data analysis, the author summed up the advantages of cooperative learning. It presented in this paper that the cooperative learning did have positive influence on Higher Vocational and Technical College English class, and it was feasible and practical to realize the strength of cooperative learning in language teaching and learning. However, due to the limitation of the time,the research had been carried out in only two classes in one college.The application on the different subjects might arouse different effects and the range of the present study was still too limited.So it was suggested that a larger sample of the questionnaire and further analysis of the data are to be done in the future as to get more detailed information of the subjects and design a more effective cooperative learning teaching approach in Higher Vocational and Technical College English classroom.