Cooperative Learning Strategies In Spoken English Teaching In Junior High School

With implementation of the new curriculum standards, the English teaching in our country has turned over a new leaf. With reference to the situation of oral English teaching in middle school, it is far from being satisfactory. The cooperative-learning method is a creative and effective teaching theory and strategy widely adopted in many countries, and is now also one of the proposed learning methods under our new curriculum reform program. The objective of this research is to work out a cooperative-learning strategy suitable for oral English teaching in junior high school, so as to build up an active teacher-student and student-student interaction teaching practice, boost efficiency in classroom English teaching, and help students enhance their comprehensive capability, especially in oral English communication skills.The research uses junior high school students as the study object, and focuses on the implementation of cooperative-learning approaches centering on oral English communications. The research starts from an investigation in oral English study of Junior High School students by means of questionnaire, interview, case study, and observation on teacher's classroom experience. It provides corresponding analysis on the existing problems and related causes in the current oral English teaching. To solve these problems, the author has designed implementation strategies and conducted teaching experiments in respect of group building, collaborative skill improvement and basic oral communications skill training, task assignment, activity control and its assessment as well as practice procedures. The research result has revealed that the teaching conceptions and strategies under this project are viable and effective. Students engaged in the experiments have shown more interest in oral English communications, stronger sense of participation, obvious improvements in collaboration skills, overall linguistic skills as well as individual personalities. It is believed that teachers can also benefit a lot from such action research in terms of teaching and innovation capabilities.