| As an international media of communication, English has attracted worldwideattention.The notability of English in China is on the rise as well year by year.Meanwhile English teaching plays a vitally important role in English studies. With thedevelopment of English teaching, the traditional teaching method receives a hugeimpact. According to New English Curriculum Standards, teaching should center onstudents and their development and the task-based teaching model should bepromoted. With the guidance of teachers, students can achieve the goal of the taskthrough perception, experience, practice, participation and cooperation. Cooperativelearning is gradually accepted by majority of teachers and scholars.As a kind of teaching system and strategy cooperative learning originated fromthe United States in1970s. In1980s David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson fromUnited States, the founder of cooperative learning, put forward that cooperativelearning was a sort of basic teaching strategy which could be applied by users in anyage to any discipline (David,2001).In the early1990s, the newly-emerged teaching strategy was introduced to China.In the context of new curriculum reform, more and more scholars and teachers focuson cooperative learning. Especially in University, secondary school and even primaryschool, teachers are vigorously trying to introduce this new teaching method to theirclass. However, it is seldom used in IELTS class, in particular, the speaking class.IELTS speaking class focuses on the improvement of individual student, in which theteachers, the questioners, are playing the dominant role. On the contrary, On thecontrary, the students are the passive answerers. Consequently, students improvenothing in their speaking skill for speaking involves the interrelationship amongpeople. Therefore, in this paper the author applied cooperative learning to IELTS speaking, hoping to enrich cooperative learning method and the application of thistheory in the IELTS speaking class.In this research, theory analysis was used combining with practical teachingactivities. Besides questionnaire (before and after the experiment), empirical research(teaching experiment), testing (pretest and posttest) and interview were applied in thisresearch to do the investigation. SPSS, a data analyzing software was used to studythe information getting from the experiment. Meanwhile comparison and analysiswere implemented to study the English learning interests and results both before andafter the experiment on a group of objects. Within16weeks’ teaching experiment, theauthor took60students in two classes of Global Education in Changchun as thesubjects, choosing one of two classes as the experimental group and the other as thecontrol group. The former one adopted the cooperative learning method and the latterone used the traditional method. First of all a pretest was conducted in the two classesbefore the experiment, aiming at getting some basic information about the learningcondition of the subjects. Then the teacher (the author) taught the two classes usingdifferent method respectively. After the experiment another test (posttest) was takenamong the subjects. Analyzing the result of the two tests, the author obtained theconclusion.This article mainly focuses on the following two research questions:1) What is the current situation of IELTS speaking learning?2) What are the influences of Cooperative Learning on IELTS students’ speakinglearning?After analyzing the data resulting from the16weeks’ experiment, the authordrew the following conclusion that:1) Basically, the students have no ability to achieve cooperative learningindependently thus teachers should get involved in the class activity;2) There is a remarkable improvement in the scores of experimental class,estimating from the result of pretest and posttest; During the process of cooperativelearning, the students’ communicative and cooperative ability are significantlyimproved. |
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