A Study On The Application Of Group Cooperative Learning To Task-based Reading Teaching

College English Curriculum Requirements (the Ministry for Higher Education,2007points out that the teaching goal of college English is to cultivate students’ comprehensive ability of using English, and at the same time to improve their capability of autonomous learning, to adapt to the demand for talent training and international exchange in China. Reading teaching is always one of the major aspects of college English teaching. But the reading teaching pattern taken by a great majority of teachers is the traditional PPP pattern, namely presentation, practice and production, which can easily bring about the following problems. For example, classroom teaching over-emphasizes language points isolated from the whole context, but hardly pays attention to the cultivation of discourse-analyzing ability; students rely too much on teachers and have a shortage of self-directed learning initiatives; students feel bored at what they are assigned to read and accordingly they have no passion for classroom participation and so on.In order to handle the above problems, reading teaching in college should go through a change from teacher-centered to students-centered and make students’learning style transfer from passive acceptance to self-access, cooperation and exploration. And task-based language teaching (abbreviated as TBLT below) is proved to be an effective approach in English reading teaching. In the process of task design and arrangement, encouraging students to be involved in group cooperative learning can not only stimulate their reading interest and arouse their desire to participate in language practice, but also help cultivate their autonomous learning ability and enhance their comprehensive proficiency in using English.The paper proceeds from the theoretical bases of TBLT and cooperative learning, and proposes a teaching framework on how to apply group cooperation to task-based reading teaching, and aims at verifying the effectiveness of this teaching plan, and also offers some teaching plan samples the author has ever used in classroom teaching.The author adopted a series of research methods such as literature study, tests and questionnaire and observations, etc., and had a teaching experiment on two classes by means of a pre-test and post-test, and attempted to apply cooperative learning to task-based reading teaching in the process of teaching College English. In the teaching experiment, the author chose two classes, an experimental class and a control class, from City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology. The former had access to the cooperative task-based reading teaching pattern, and the latter was exposed to the traditional teaching pattern. Both the two classes took a pre-test and post-test. The experiment lasted for18weeks and when it was over, the experimental class accepted a questionnaire survey. The pre-test showed no remarkable difference in test result between the two classes. However, the experimental class achieved a much better result in the post-test Ihan the control class. And it was found in the questionnaire and interview that the students from the experimental class were positive about their learning interest, learning motivation, degree of independence and reading capabilities, and demonstrated some improvements on these aspects to some degrees.