A Study Of Improving The Effectiveness Of Group Work In English Classroom In Senior High School

The Reform of New Curriculum Standards advocate that English teaching should be student-centered and provide students with better learning conditions and methods. In the meantime, New Curriculum Standards proposes autonomous learning, cooperative learning and inquiry learning. Group work, as a way to realize student-centered English teaching, is really a combination of autonomous learning, cooperative learning and inquiry learning. In addition, group work can create relaxed and pleasing learning atmosphere, can stir up students’learning interest and passion and can develop and improve students’language communicative ability. However, in current teaching practice, lots of English teachers find it not easy to carry out group work in classroom because there are many factors which influence the smooth progress of group work, such as the way of grouping, the differences among students, the topic chose for groups and teachers’ guiding etc. What is worse, it seems easier for teachers to ignore these problems in daily teaching which has greatly decreased the efficiency of group work. Therefore, this study focuses on the measures which will improve the effectiveness of group work in English classroom.This study aims at exploring the following three questions.(1) So far, what problems exist in group work in English classrooms in high school?(2) What factors affect the smooth development of group work?(3) What can teachers do to improve the effectiveness of group work?The research subject of this paper is the eighty one students from two classes in senior two in Xi’an No.86High School. The author uses experimental method which includes questionnaire and classroom observation. The very experiment has three parts, namely pre-test, while-test and post-test. In pre-test and post-test, the researcher uses questionnaires and oral test respectively while in while-test classroom observation is applied.There are altogether five chapters in the thesis. Chapter one is about the background information of group work and the exact research problems. In chapter two, the author reviews the definition, types, theoretical basis of group work and factors that influence group work. Chapter three is methodology in which the author introduces the research subject, instruments and research procedure. In chapter four, the author analyzes the data and results of the research and discusses the measures of improving the effectiveness of group work. Chapter five is the conclusion part in which the author gives a summary of this paper and also mentions some limitations of the research and suggestions for further study on group work.