Effects Of Cooperative Learning On Students’ Writing Quality: An Empirical Study In The Chinese High School EFL Context

Cooperatvie learning(CL) is a teaching approach that emphasizes group work andstudent participation. Ever since it was introduced in the language classroom in the1960s, ithas been proved to be an effective way in language teaching by many researches, whichencouraged many researchers at home to apply it to English writing class and they havegained positive results. At present, the holistic scoring method of students’ compositions hasbeen mainly used by researchers investigating the effects of CL on English writing teaching.But few of them employed an objective scoring, which involves scoring students’compositions from the following three dimensions: the language fluency, accuracy andcomplexity. This study tries to explore the effect of cooperative learning on the languagefluency, acuracy and complexity. To be specific, it addresses the following three researchquestions:1. Are there any differences in the fluency of the compositions between the controlgroup and the experimental group in the pretest and posttest?2. Are there any differences in the accuracy of the compositions between the controlgroup and the experimental group in the pretest and posttest??3. Are there any differences in the complexity of the compositions between the controlgroup and the experimental group in the pretest and posttest??Two intact classes from Zhenhua High School with87students participated in thestudy.43students in the experimental group(EG) were treated with CL, while44studentsin the control group(CG) were treated with the traditional whole-class teaching. SPSS wasrun to analyze the statistics. The findings are as follows:1. CL does not have much more advantages in improving the students’ languagefluency in their writing.2. CL has much more advantages in improving the students’ language accuracy in theirwriting. In general, the posttest has shown that the students taught with CL have significantlyreduced the total number of errors and increased the total number of error-free t-units in theircompositions. 3. CL has much more advantages in improving the students’ language complexity intheir writing. In general, the total number of the clauses and dependent clauses hassignificantly increased in the compositions written by the students taught with CL in theposttest.The implications of the study to the teaching of English writing in Chinese high schoolare made, the limitations of the study are pointed out and some suggestions for the futurestudy on CL are made.