Cooperative Learning For Communicative Purpose

According to College English Curriculum Requirements (2007), the generalobjective of College English is to develop students’ ability to use English in awell-rounded way, especially in listening and speaking, so that they will be able tocommunicate effectively in their future studies and careers as well as socialinteractions, and at the same time enhance their ability to study independently andimprove their general cultural awareness so as to meet the needs of China’s socialdevelopment and international exchanges. After years of teaching reform and efforts,College English classroom teaching is still dominated by teachers’ explanation.Students are most often than not under a passive learning position, lacking theenthusiasm in learning English, and students don’t have enough opportunities forlanguage communication and practice, let alone cultivating and improving Englishcommunication competence.Cooperative Learning (CL for short) advocates learners to complete the task ofclassroom teaching by means of their own cooperation and efforts. CL theory suggeststhat the implementation of cooperative learning techniques creates a positive andrelaxed learning environment, develops an active classroom atmosphere, cultivatelearners’ positive learning attitude and sense of participation, build good learningconfidence and psychological well-being of the learners, and changes the relationshipbetween teachers and students, and students themselves to a large extent. Therefore,CL greatly promotes mutual assistance and interaction between learners and provideslearners with more opportunities for language communication. Based on CL theories,this paper attempts to explore feasible ways and means to cultivate students’ listeningand speaking competence as well as the competence of effective communication insocial interactions by means of practical teaching and learning activities in college English listening and speaking class.The participants of the research are32non-English major sophomores from twoEnglish listening and speaking classes of in Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT).Class1takes part in the research as the experimental class (16students) withcooperative learning techniques, while class2(16students) as the control class withthe traditional teaching methods. The experiment lasts for15weeks. Based on the dataelicited from questionnaires, tests (pre-test and post-test), and interviews of studentsafter experiment, the researcher comes up with some major findings by the analysis ofthe data gathered. The results show that the test scores of students in experimental classhave relative improvement compared with the scores of students in control class, andthe average score of experimental class is higher than that of control class.This paper confirms that CL has unique advantages of arousing students’ learningenthusiasm and promoting sense of participation, and in particular, has a greatstimulation for English language learning with communicative purpose, and to someextent, improves students’ communicative competence. In light of the problems foundin the implementation of CL, the paper finally puts forward some suggestions andthinking on how to improve the implementation of CL in college English listening andspeaking class.