An Empirical Study Of Cooperative Learning In Mitigating College English Classroom Reticence

With the growing need for global cultural, economical and technological communication, English teachers and researchers have been attaching more and more importance to the development of students’ ability in oral communication. But what is happening now in college English classrooms in China often frustrates and concerns both the teachers and the students. Many college students are used to listening and reluctant to communicate in English in class. This makes it difficult for the teacher to get enough feedback or successfully carry out the planned class activities. The lack of oral practice hinders the students’ development of language competence and communication skills.Researchers home and abroad try to solve the problem of English classroom reticence, exploring its causes and solutions. The causes include the aspects of culture influence, the students’ character and the teaching method. Solutions mostly focus on the teachers, their teaching style, their questioning technique and the teaching preference. Few of them are from the aspect of the students’ learning.Cooperative learning with solid theoretical foundations including the developmental theory, the goal structure theory and the choice theory has been proved in many experiments to be feasible in improving the students’ academic achievement as well as their communication skills. Based on the theories about the language learning processes of input, interaction, intake and output, it is assumed that interaction helps students better understand and memorize the input, provides them opportunities to practice and produce better output. This study carries out an experiment to explore the effects of cooperative learning in increasing students’ language output in communication and mitigating the college English classroom reticence.Firstly the researcher conducts a survey among132sophomores from College of Continuing Education of Shenzhen University to find out their level of classroom reticence. The data collected from the questionnaires shows that there is strong reticence in college English classroom. Then two classes containing all together64students are chosen for the experiment, one as the experimental class and the other as the controlled class. In the12-week experiment, the students of the experimental class have been guided to study using cooperative learning method, and the students of the controlled class receive traditional lectures as before. Analyzing the data from different instruments, including the questionnaires, the achievement tests and the audio-recordings, the research finds that there is significant inverse correlation between the classroom reticence level and the students’ achievement and cooperative learning approach is effective in mitigating the college English classroom reticence. It is hoped that this study could be a reference for further theoretical research and teaching practice about classroom reticence mitigating strategies.