The Empirical Study Of The Application Of Cooperative Learning In Teaching English Reading

English reading proficiency, an important aspect of evaluating English learners’comprehension capacity, is regarded as the basis of improving other language skills.Development of English reading ability has drawn increasing attention from Englishteachers. Furthermore, with the rapid development of technology and internalization,an increasing amount of materials and documents are published in English whichrequires students to have high ability. However, due to the expanding enrolment inrecent years, students’ English ability is in different levels. In addition, collegestudents just have three-hour English lessons per week and they lack ability inautonomous learning, which make students have difficulties in improving theirreading ability. How to change this urgent situation is becoming a challenge for bothEnglish teachers and students.Up to now, various methods have undergone extensive trials in reading teaching,such as the content-based instruction, the task-based language teaching, thecommunicative approach, which have improved learners’ ability in English reading tosome extent. Educators have been updating and improving those methods over time.Nowadays, more and more scholars realize that teachers and students are the principalpart in learning process. Only if creativity and initiative of both sides are given fullplay, can reading gain great success. The author makes an attempt to applycooperative learning to teaching process of English reading. Cooperative learning hasbeen researched for decades in improving learners’ achievement and non-intelligenceabilities in various academics, such as Chinese, math, English, history etc.. The resultsshow that the learners have made outstanding achievements in learning, affection andsocial communication, leading to the popularization of cooperative learning. However,it was not until the end of1990s, this teaching method was explored in our country.According to the literature, the research of cooperative learning is mainly done inprimary and secondary schools, while there is little research concerning college English teaching, especially in English reading comprehension. It is significant andindispensable to explore whether cooperative learning can enhance non-Englishmajors’ reading ability.The author employs cooperative learning in the teaching of English reading forthe purpose of:(1) improve the reading achievement of the learners with differentlevels;(2) strengthen the learners’ motivation of reading;(3) enhance the learners’social skills. The experiment was conducted in Grade two, Human Resource Major,Hua Shang College, Shanxi University of Finance and Economics from September,2011to January2012. The author employs tests, questionnaires and interviews tocarry out the experiment. The analysis indicates that by using different kinds of CLmethods, students’ competence in reading has been improved efficiently, especiallyfor the average students. Cooperative learning can motivate non-English major to readand enhance students’ confidence in English reading. Students’ social skills developedbut the effect is not obvious.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one offers a concise introduction onthe research topics，the background and the structure of the thesis. Chapter two givesliterature review of cooperative learning and provides theoretical basis for the thesis.Chapter three offers main research methodologies conducted by the researcher and theprocedures of the application of cooperative learning. Chapter four gives the detailedprocedures in teaching English reading. Chapter five reports the results of dataanalysis. The last chapter mainly states the research findings, limitations and teachinginspirations of this experiment.