A Study On The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Newspaper Reading Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

Reading ability, as one of the four abilities in language learning, is a major approachfor people to communicate and to achieve knowledge. Besides, with the development ofcurriculum reform in high school, students in high schools should read more extensivelyand master more reading skills, required by the New English Curriculum Criteria. It alsostates that schools and teachers can make full use of all kinds of teaching resources, suchas English magazines, English videos, the Internet and so on. In the circumstances, it isbecoming popular to develop the students’reading abilities with the help of Englishnewspapers. Compared with current textbooks, English newspapers have some positivecharacteristics: up-to-date materials, authentic language, various subjects close tostudents’life etc. Obviously, they are excellent auxiliary materials for reading abilitytraining. Nowadays, a great many English teachers in high schools have attempted toapply English newspapers to the reading teaching process as the supplement of Englishtextbooks. Nonetheless, it needs further studying how to improve students’reading levelsmore effectively with the help of newspapers.Aiming at dealing with this phenomenon, I did a large number of previous theoreticresearches. Then on the basis of many theories, such as the Social Interdependence theory,Need theory and so on, I state the definition of Cooperative learning and its five elements.Besides, I proposed the assumption of Heterogeneous Cooperative Groups in Englishnewspapers reading classes, which was combined with the present English teachingreality in high school, hoping to find the answers to the following questions: (1) DoesCooperative Learning arouse students’interest in English learning and motivate them toread? (2) Does Cooperative Learning improve students’English newspaper readingabilities and their reading proficiency? (3) Does Cooperative Learning alleviate students’reading anxiety?Therefore, from September, 2009 to July, 2010, I implemented an experimental studywhich involved 114 students in two classes of Grade 2008 in Zibo Experimental HighSchool. During the research, I used pre-test, post-test and two questionnaires to helpanalyze the results. Also, Cooperative learning model was applied in the experimentalclass, while the traditional teaching methods were used in the control class. After the experiment, the same reading test was given to both two classes and all their scores wereanalyzed, and the results showed that the students in the experimental class had improvedtheir reading abilities more than the students in the control class. Besides, a questionnairewas conducted to both classes before the experiment, and after the experiment anotherquestionnaire was also performed in both classes. According to them, the conclusion canbe drawn that the students in the experimental class have a higher academic motivation, agreater interest in English learning and a relieved reading anxiety.