Employing The Group Cooperative Learning Approach To Develop Learners’ Motivation In Senior High School

At the present stage, a common phenomenon is that students become more and more passive in English class. So it is a crucial task for teachers to arouse and develop their learning motivation. Motivation is considered to be one of the most effective factors in learning. In the past few decades, many researchers and scholars home and abroad have devoted to the research of learning motivation and an amount of achievements were made. However, which learning method is the most powerful one to the students’ learning motivation remains to be discussed. The desire of making learning more student-centered to improve the learning motivation is reflected in lots of teaching approaches that engage students actively in the learning process. Thus, the thesis aims at illustrating the employment of the group cooperative learning approach for improving senior high school students’ learning motivation. Meanwhile, it aims to draw teachers’ and other educators’ attention to the importance of the learning motivation in foreign and second language learning.From the typical examples, it has been proved that the group cooperative learning not only benefits the students’ independent learning, group and cooperation consciousness. What’s more, it has a positive effect on promoting students’ learning motivation. There are certain conditions needed to be reached before motivation is generated in the group cooperative learning. A learner’s decision to act will be influenced by internal factors. The external factors(such as teachers and the cooperative learning)also play very important roles.99participants selected in this study were Grade one students in Economics and Trade Senior High School in DaLian, and a questionnaire, an interview and the learning achievements were adopted for the investigation. By using the group cooperative learning, the learning achievement of the experimental class has been improved remarkably, but the controlled class has no obvious improvement. The findings of this study suggested that the group cooperative learning is an effective way in promoting the learning motivation. In the experiments, students working in small groups have more chances to practice and use the target language. The whole class is in an active atmosphere with a strong motivation and great interest.The conclusion part, focuses on the implications, the limitation of the study and presents some suggestions for the future study in this field.