An Empirical Study Of The Cooperative Learning Approach To Teaching Vocabulary In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is the basis of the formation and development of the four skills, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing, and it plays a vital role in English learning. Only when a person has possessed enough vocabulary can he express his opinion precisely and communicate with others efficiently. Recently more and more attention has been paid to vocabulary teaching by researchers. However, prominent problems still exist; the traditional teacher-centered vocabulary teaching is unable to meet the needs of modern teaching. The study tries to apply the approach of cooperative learning in senior high schools in order to seek a better vocabulary teaching method.The technique of cooperative learning was first referred to in the early 18th century and some western countries probed into it in the middle of the 20th century. Cooperative learning is quite popular among teachers and students because it changes the teaching pattern of teachers'lecturing basically and students'learning passively. China began to do research and experiment on cooperative learning in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, most of the researches were carried out in universities and few were done in senior high schools. The study tries to verify the effects that cooperative learning produces to vocabulary teaching by carrying out an empirical experiment. It is intended to prove the next two hypotheses. Firstly, cooperative learning helps to improve senior high school students'efficiency of memorizing words; secondly, cooperative learning could enhance students'motivation for study, increase their participation in class activities and reduce their anxiety for learning English.The subjects of the experiment are the students in Grade One who come from Liuyang No.8 Senior High School. The result of the pretest shows that before the experiment the experimental class and the control class are equal in vocabulary achievement. A posttest was given to the two classes after the empirical experiment was carried out for three months. The Independent-Samples T Test was done with the software SPSS 16.0 and its result reveals that the achievement of the experimental class is much better than the control class. Besides, the outcome of the questionnaire investigation and interviews further illustrate the two hypotheses.It has been proved by our empirical experiment that cooperative learning indeed has positive effects on vocabulary teaching in senior high schools, but the problems existing in this study should not be ignored. The author sincerely hopes that the study will give some enlightenment for further research and will finally promote English teaching in senior high schools.