A Study Of The Application Of Cooperative Learning Model In Students’ Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is undoubtedly important in English language study. It is the basis for the development ofevery skill---listening, speaking, reading and writing. The lack of vocabulary is a “bottle-neck”, whichprevents students from mastering other English skills better. The traditional vocabulary teaching neglectsthe characteristics of vocabulary but adopts some improper ways to teach vocabulary. Besides, it ignorestraining the students’ vocabulary learning strategy, which makes students memorize vocabularysystematically. The new criterion of English course in school makes great demands on vocabulary teaching.It requires teachers to reconsider completely their teaching methods and conceptions of English vocabularyteaching. According to the characteristics of vocabulary, this paper advocates using various ways to preventand consolidate vocabulary. Moreover, the paper introduces some ways of training students’ vocabularylearning strategy based on the features of students’ study. The thesis hopes that the paper will benefit theEnglish vocabulary teaching in schools.The study addressed these two research questions:(1) Will the cooperative learning model help theparticipants to learn vocabulary more effectively than the non-cooperative learning model?(2) Will thecooperative learning model help to improve the participants’interpersonal relationship with the teacher andpeers? The study recruited Class10and Class11of Anhui Vocational College of Industry and Commerceas its participants. Class10was the experimental class and Class11was the control class. The totalnumber of students in the two classes was63respectively. The instructional experiment lasted7weeks,after which a posttest was carried out to test the effects of the two instructional models on vocabularylearning. In the posttest, two instruments were used: one test of target words and expressions and aquestionnaire, both of which were the same as those in the pretest. In the process of experiment, both thesubjects and the teacher in the experimental class have been interviewed.The quantitative data of the pretest and the posttest were analyzed by means of Statistical Package forSocial Science (SPSS Software for MS Windows12.0). The scores of the entrance examination showedthere was no significant difference between the two classes in terms of English proficiency. The results ofthe target words and expressions test proved that most participants had little knowledge about the target testwords and expressions before the experiment; and the results of the questionnaire indicated that theproblems of the experimental class’s participants’ interpersonal relationship were mainly twofold: on theone hand, their teacher-student relationship showed there were obvious superior-subordinate characteristicsin the teacher-student relationship, and most of them thought whatever their teacher said was right, and theyshould not disagree or argue with the teacher; on the other hand, their student-student relationship presentedthat most of the students lacked motivation to build a good relationship with their peers and they did notknow how to cooperate with their classmates. The results of the posttest indicated that the cooperativeinstructional model had significant effects on vocabulary learning achievement; and the CL model waseffective in improving the participants’ interpersonal relationship with their teacher and peers.