A Study Of The Application Of Cooperative Learning To College English Listening Teaching

Since the1970s, Cooperative Learning has become a pervasive educational approach in the United States (Wang,2002). Nowadays, Cooperative Learning(CL), as a creative, effective, theoretic and strategic teaching approach, has been widely employed in many countries around the world in Foreign Language Teaching.College English teaching in China is facing a serious challenge. The College English Curriculum Requirements in2007has put forward teaching reform:the core of teaching, which used to be reading, has started to involve listening and speaking aiming to enhance students’comprehensive and communicative capability. There is no denying that activating students in college English classrooms is more important than ever. Under such circumstances, CL, as a set of successful instructional strategies, which has considerable advantages ranging from motivating students’ learning interests and interaction to improving their language competence and skills, is right in accordance with the College English Curriculum Requirements and is undoubtedly a beneficial attempt. However, the uses of the CL approach in college English listening teaching (CELT)are few and far between. Hence, the author of the thesis intends to conduct an experimental study to testify the effectiveness of the application of CL in CELT.Depending on CL theory, the author conducted an experimental study by using contrastive analysis. This study was conducted in two classes in Taishan University, consisting of100non-English majors. The research goals of the study are to prove that:(1) CL can increase the learners’ inner motivation and classroom involvement, and reduce their English learning anxiety.(2) CL can improve listening proficiency.(3) The correlation between listening proficiency and CL use is positive. In this study, various types of instruments are used to collect sufficient quantitative data, including pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire, listening proficiency tests (taken from College English Test Band4). The data was collected and analyzed with SPSS13.0. The obtained data were analyzed through independent samples T-test and paired samples T-test and correlation analysis between learners’ CL ability and listening proficiency was undertaken. Based on the data analysis and discussion, this paper tries to reveal several findings on the effects of CL on learners’ listening interest and listening proficiency.First, CL is effective in fostering students’ ability of using CL approach. It can arouse students’ listening interest, develop students’ positive attitude towards listening and enhance their inner motivation.Second, CL is efficient to improve students’ listening proficiency through the analysis from their academic achievements in the pre-test and post-test.Third, a significant correlation exists between students’ use of CL and their improvement in listening proficiency.The study drew the following pedagogical implications:First, to create a better cooperative English listening study environment, the teacher needs to play some specific roles. Second, CL, as a more efficient teaching approach, can not replace the traditional teaching approaches completely and should be used properly. Last, teachers should pay attention to students’low quality output with many errors and help them develop communicative competence.