An Investigation And Research On The Feasibility Of The Group Work In Elementary Chinese In Indonesia

Group work have been adopted by more and more teachers in the classroomlanguage teaching, and the advantages have been seen by more and more people. Oneobvious advantage is to increase the times of speaking Chinese, thus the students havemore time and opportunity to practice the target language in the classroom. Besides, itcan arouse the enthusiasm of the students.However, group work hasn’t been used much in the Chinese classes in Indonesia.Through the practice of teaching Chinese language in a primary school in Indonesia, thewriter introduced the form of group work into the Chinese lessons, and then discussedthe feasibility of group work from the perspective of students. Students are theaudiences, the participants in the activities organized by teachers.The main purpose of using group work in the Chinese classes is to improvestudents’ Chinese proficiency. As the classrooms of Chinese as a Second Language arebecoming more and more "student-centered", students are often considered the mainbody who are supposed to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching activities.This thesis mainly investigated the change of student attitude to Chinese learningbefore and after the implementation of group work, students’ evaluation on the groupwork, as well as the students’ expectations for teacher through questionnaires,interviews and classroom observations.The writer found that student’s interest in learning Chinese increased greatly andthey had more chances to speak in the classroom. Most students said they want to go toChinese lessons. They believed that the group work were interesting and effectiveclassroom activities.The writer also found some problems, such as classroom discipline, groupingmembers, the inequality of opportunity and other issues. To solve these problems, thisthesis proposed some suggestions about the group work, and provided some referencefor future Chinese teachers, especially teachers in Indonesia, to carry out group work.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction,containing the reason of choosing the topic, the research background and thesignificance of the topic. The second chapter is a theoretical study on group work. Itprobed the connotation, the form and the characteristics of group work, and introducedthe theoretical basis of group work---cooperative learning theory and communicative theory. It also reviewed some points of the main literature about group work. The thirdchapter describes the research design and implementation. It introduces the Chineselanguage teaching situation in Yayasan Pendidikan Nasional Karangturid School inSemarang in Indonesia where the experiment was implemented. The fourth chapterreports the results. The fifth chapter pointed out the inadequacies of this study.