A Study On Improving Students’ Oral Communicative Competence In Independent College By Cooperative Learning

Currently in China, aside from the traditional state-run universities, independent college, which is the outcome of higher education reform, emerged in2004. The students enrolled by independent colleges show less interest in English learning and lack of self-confidence in English learning due to the deficiency in knowledge basis and learning strategy in middle school, which weaken their oral English communicative competence. In order to deepen education reform and improve the quality of college English teaching, Ministry of Education issued College English Curriculum Requirements in2007, which puts forward three requirements in listening, speaking, reading and writing to the non-English undergraduates, and specifically puts emphasis on the training of students’English listening and speaking. But according to the questionnaire made by the author before the experiment, it is found that, in the English classroom teaching, most of the students are inactive to participate in communicative activities. Therefore their oral communicative competence may not be optimistic. Evidently it needs to be studied that how we can improve the oral communicative competence of independent college students.Taking J. Piaget’s Constructivism as the theoretical basis and adopting cooperative learning, the author, in a whole semester, has carried out a contrast teaching experiment in listening and speaking course on109freshmen from Clinical College of Tianjin Medical University. The author attempts to enable the students to either obtain more opportunities to learn and speak English with the teammates after class or present their achievements competitively with other groups after finishing the cooperative classroom activities in the class.After the experiment, the result of the questionnaire shows that the students have improved by cooperative learning either in English learning interests and confidence or in oral communicative competence, which is supposed to be a virtuous cycle. And the findings from the study support the hypothesis that cooperative learning is effective and practicable in improving the non-English majors’ communicative competence of the independent college. To solve and analyze the questions in the study, questionnaires and interview are adopted in the experiment as well. In the final part, the suggestions are given for further study.