Investigation Into The Strategies To Improve The Application Of Small-group Cooperative And Inquiry Learning In High School English Teaching

High school English education is the crucial stage for students to learn English because it should not only satisfy the urgent needs for high quality intelligent to contribute to our nation’s development, but also tries to ease high school students’ high pressure on graduation, job-hunting, and matriculation. What’s more, it must meet students’needs for developing their individuality and personality. New Curriculum Standard points that high school students should possess five aspects of English learning ability including language skill, learning strategy, language knowledge, culture awareness and emotional attitude. In this way, traditional rote learning and teaching method are not suitable any more. Generally, the traditional English teaching is teacher-centered. English teachers, authority of the class, organize and guide the class, while students are passive even forced to learn. They have few chances to do creative thinking and solve problems by themselves. The result is that most students lost interest in English gradually and some even quit learning. What’s worse, students’creativity and personality are badly constrained. Therefore, new curriculum reform begins to come out.Since2004the first round of such an educational reform was carried out in Guangdong province, Hainan province, and Shandong province etc, almost all the schools have been trying to improve their English teaching methods. According to new curriculum reform, teaching method reform should aim at optimizing students’ learning method, enhancing their self-study ability. And the design and organization of high school English classes should also abide by this direction. The ideal outcome is that through students’observance, experience and exploration, they can make full use of new learning method actively and explore their potential. Under this condition, many new teaching methods are introduced such as task-based teaching, scaffolding teaching, story telling teaching and so on.Among these methods, small group cooperative and inquiry learning method stands out with its advantages which originated from America in the1970s and spread quickly all over the world. It’s a kind of creative, efficient teaching theory and strategy, which is considered as the most important and successful education reform. It advocates that students should be active to participate in teaching activities, be brave to put forward questions and be initiative to analyze and solve these questions in order to change rote learning. In small group learning, students are equal and they can encourage and cooperate with each other, which is likely to cultivate their team work spirit and make their sense of success and desire to learn stronger.However, when teachers are applying this new method in our own country, a lot of problems showed up. The author used to do internship as an English teacher in an experimental high school in Henan province and noticed that in the application of small-group cooperative and inquiry learning there are a lot of problems which have decreased the efficiency of it. According to the author’s questionnaire, there are five major problems:unreasonable group division and placement, improper question design, traditional role of teachers, loss of comprehensive assessment system and dull after-class student activity.Based on these problems and relative theories, the author also put forward some strategies to improve the application of small-group cooperative and inquiry learning, hoping that English teaching in China can develop in a good way. These strategies include:to place and divide students by different principles and purposes, to design inspiring and creative questions, to change the teachers’traditional role into coordinator and supporters at class, to set up comprehensive assessment system and to hold rich after-class student activity.