Improve The Effectiveness Of Cooperative Learning In English Class Of Senior High School

Cooperative learning was first originated in1970s in United States and was introduced to China in the1990s.It has been proved to be an effective learning strategy to increase language practice opportunities, promote positive learning atmosphere, create active relationship among students and then improve learning quality. However, teachers often face with some difficulties and problems during its implementation, such as unequal participation, top students’domination of the activities, uncertainty of each member’s accountability, overuse of Chinese, inefficient contribution, etc. All these factors lead the cooperative learning to a superficial and ineffective learning strategy. Considering the above situation, the author arranged this research to figure out the factors that influence the effectiveness of cooperative learning. This research is conducted to solve the following questions as follows:(1)What are the factors that influence the effectiveness of cooperative learning?(2) What are the underlying reasons for these factors?To achieve this aim, this study chose40English video classes of senior high school and selected40cooperative learning activities from them to make classroom behavior observations and data analyses.The author adopted a new viewpoint of combining the fishbone model proposed by Professor Wang Lu with the classroom observation note form to evaluate and analyze the cooperative activities.Some typical cases were also transcribed to make a qualitative research.This observation lasted almost two months.Various techniques were employed to obtain quantitative and qualitative statistics.The results indicate that:(1)Individual accountability was the most significant factor that influence the effectiveness of cooperative learning, and then in the order of task design, guidance strategies and process evaluation, respectively. Some detailed elements are discussed in the research. The author cherishes the idea that it is necessary to design an appropriate task, make a scientific group system, clarify group member’s accountability, provide an urgent guidance and establish a reasonable evaluation system to obtain an effective cooperative learning activity.(2) After the analyses of each factor, some reasons hide behind the factors become evident, such as the deficiency of oral English, inappropriate understanding of cooperative learning, lack of cooperative skills, improper design of learning task, inadequate description of specific learning circumstances, insufficient guidance and evaluation systems, etc.With the data analyzed and results presented in this paper, the author proposed some suggestions as cultivating students’individual accountability, promoting interaction and cooperation among group members, designing an appropriate learning task, make an effective guidance and so on. Even though there are some limitations in this research, the author hopes to shed some lights for teachers in the implementation of cooperative learning in senior high school English classes.