The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Reading Teaching

Guidelines for Reform and Development of Basic Education issuedby the State Council in May2001states as its main goal to "encouragecooperative learning, promote exchanges and development ofstudents and teachers, thus enhancing teaching and learning of theteachers and students". It specifically mentions and gives attention tothe cooperative learning approach. The new curriculum standardspromote new teaching ideas and new teaching methods. Cooperativelearning has become an outstanding aim as well as the process in thenew curriculum reform. It is conducive to maintaining and enhancingstudent interest in learning, and to training students English proficiency.Cooperative learning is increasingly important.High school English group cooperative learning is a teachingapproach, which has basic principles and methods as a guide,combines the specific characteristics of the disciplines of learningpsychology and high school students English learning characteristics. Itaims to promote all-round development of students in their cognitionand emotion, personality and social abilities.Owing to a lack of specific implementation strategies for highschool English teaching, cooperative learning has many problems inspecific operations. Cooperative learning is increasingly losing its core inthe formal shell, increasingly becoming a packaging mode away fromits essence which is used in open-class by teachers. This article proposesspecific implementation strategies of cooperative learning for domestichigh school English reading instruction, to enable students to engage inefficient mutual learning for accomplishing common tasks in curricularand extracurricular activities. It could improve the reading ability ofstudents, at the same time improve competition and cooperationawareness, and help students develop their potential as well as individuality. Finally, the author conducted teaching experiments in twoparallel classes with the proposed cooperative learning implementationstrategy instruction and the traditional way of teaching. The results areanalyzed at the end of the semester. The experimental results show thatmutual assistance and cooperation through group learning enhancestudents English reading skills, English learning motivation, learningstrategy and students interest in learning English.