An Experimental Study On Cooperative Learning In Oral English Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

Oral English has always been a weakness of vocational school students. Almost 80 percent of them lack good English learning background and they have very low English language proficiency. Consequently, their oral English level is even lower. They are short of efficient strategies for oral English learning. So they are reluctant to communicate in English in or out of class, which hinders their progress. Cooperative learning(CL) is a kind of learning & teaching theory and strategy system. The author attempts to apply CL in Oral English teaching in order to solve the problems.There are two research questions: Is cooperative learning more effective than traditional teaching method in improving students’ oral-English learning strategies? And Can CL effectively improve students’ oral English proficiency?This paper studies the influence of CL on students’ oral English proficiency and strategies-planning ability for oral English learning. The experiment was performed in two classes(each of which consisted of 50 students) of a secondary vocational school in Chengde city, Hebei province. The 2013 accouters class one was the experimental class, using CL method and the 2013 accouters class two was the control class, using the traditional teacher-centered method. Firstly, at the beginning and the end of the experiment, the researcher respectively made an investigation concerning the students’ oral English learning strategy by using questionnaires, trying to learn the changes in students’ oral English learning strategies. Secondly, at the beginning of the experiment, 2013 accouters class one and class two took the same level in the public English test system to see the proficiency of the two classes. The test results were analyzed using SPSS 16.0 which showed that there was no significant difference between the two classes. At the end of the experiment, the two classes took another oral test to learn the changes in students’ oral English proficiency. Finally, at the end of the experiment, the researcher interviewed 10 students from different levels in the experimental class to know their opinion about using cooperative learning to improve their oral English learning strategies and their oral English learning proficiency.The researcher used spss16.0 to analyze the collected data. According to the results and analysis, the following conclusions are reached: Cooperative learning has positive effects on the students’ cognitive strategies, Meta-cognitive strategies and memory strategies in oral English learning process. Adopting cooperative learning in classes of secondary vocational school can effectively promote students’ oral English proficiency.The positive experimental results indicate that CL can potentially promote the development of students’ oral English proficiency to the greatest possible degree. Some proposals were given on how to improve the application of CL in oral English teaching in secondary vocational schools.