A Study Of Cooperative Learning In English Reading For The Grade One Students In A Senior High

As an important means of input, reading is a basic way of obtaining information in language learning. Besides, reading stands at the top English tests in various grades in high schools in China. Therefore, reading is considered a most essential skill for high school students to master in their English learning. But the fact is that many high school students have difficulty in reading, especially for the Grade One students in Senior Highs. They are faced with all these problems. Firstly, compared with the Junior High, the vocabulary varies a lot both in quatity and degree of difficulty. Secondly, their English levels are different from one other in many aspects. Finally, as they know little about students" reading ability and language knowledge, teachers can not guide all the students individually as the result of the large size of the class and limited time. All these facts result in poor efficiency in English teaching and learning. What’s worse, many students turn frustrated and lose their interest and self-confidence in English learning.Cooperative Learning has been long tested to be a practical and effective teaching and learning strategy. It has gained great success in promoting students" motivation for learning and self-esteem, fostering positive feelings toward classmates, and improving performance on tasks of comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving by means of cooperating, sharing information and offering assistance to one another. Therefore, the researcher does the experiment of applying the Cooperative Learning to the reading class in Grade One of Senior High.This paper explores how to put the cooperative learning theory into the practice of promoting the teaching quality and learning efficiency in Grade One class of senior high and aims at establishing a new type of fast and effective student-centered teaching method for this course. The result of the study show that the cooperative learning method in English reading teaching in Grade One of the Senior High can not only stimulate students’learning interests,boosting the students motivation, but also improve their reading ability,as well as their language proficiency. However, there are also some students who have not show obvious improvement. Anyhow, the study proves that most of the learners have made great progress with this method.