The Action Research On Cooperative Learning In The Teaching Of English Writing In Junior High School

The level of English writing skills reflects the overall competence of astudent. However, in present English language teaching, writing hasn’treceived due attention. What’s more, students’ writing ability is far fromthe desired objectives of the Curriculum Standards. The traditionalapproach of teaching writing is often like this: First the teacher instructshow to write, then gives a writing assignment, and finally the teachermakes comments on the composition after reviewing. This traditionalway of teaching writing, which emphasizes the results writing but ignoresthe process, lacks interpersonal communication, causing manystudents to lose interest in writing. The current English CurriculumStandards advocates that “English teaching should be combined withemotional education organically in a variety of cooperative learningactivities to promote students to learn from each other and help eachother, to experience a collective sense of honor and achievement, andto develop the spirit of cooperation.” Obviously, the traditional way ofteaching writing runs counter to requirements of the current EnglishCurriculum Standards, which needs instructional reform.In order to change this situation, I conducted an action research onCooperative Writing in my own class. Based on the theory ofCooperative Learning and the practical context of English teaching injunior high school and students’ psychology and emotion, the researchaims to explore two aspects of Cooperative Writing as below:1) itsfeasibility in writing teaching;2) its effect on changing the students’learning behavior, attitudes, cooperative awareness and ability.Through the action research and data collection, the research hasreceived the predicted results, which shows that Cooperative Writing isfeasible and effective when applied to junior high school. It arousesstudents’ interest of cooperation and the satisfaction of group-oriented goals. It also brings students initiative into full play and let them derivepleasure from English writing and thus really research the aim ofimproving students’ ability to write in English. As the teacher and theaction research, I also benefited a lot in this process.