A Study On The Effects Of Cooperative Learning For English Learners In Senior High School

At present, with the experiment of new curriculum reform, English teaching gets more and more attention in senior English teaching in China. In traditional teaching methods, students mainly learn based on the pattern of students listening and teachers giving. However, the learning procedure, the attitude, engagement, and ability of communications and cooperation development are often neglected. The first year in senior high school, is an important stage to raise students’ interest and the ability of learning English. The National English New Curriculum for Senior High Schools states the levels for English learning clearly, Grade-one students should meet level6. Its main requirements are:1. The students should enhance English learning motivation and have a strong sense of self-regulated learning.2. The students need to plan, organize and implement learning activities with the help of teachers.3. The students should learn to use a variety of educational resources in study.4. The students can make the self-evaluation of learning processes and outcomes and adjust learning objectives and policies.This research tries exploring the effects of cooperative learning in English teaching in senior high school. To analyze the senior high school students’ motivation, their attitudes towards cooperative learning and the participation situation and their sense of responsibility and cooperation under the cooperative learning environments. It will offer some valuable information for the other English teachers and hope to be helpful to English teaching reform for students’ English learning.For English teaching in high school, the key question is how to improve student participation in the classroom and make the learning ability integrate with improving examination scores organically.This thesis first introduces the theory of cooperative learning, advantages of cooperative learning and its critiques and discusses the effect elements of cooperative environment formation:engagement, community and cooperation.Then the author designs an experiment with duration of eight months to carry out cooperative learning. The experimental class students were put into cooperative learning environment. They were asked to complete a main task of reading English novel. The traditional teaching was used in the control class, the students tried to accomplish the same task. We observed the changes of the students from experimental class in cooperative learning environment. The results were compared before and after the experiment. The results of experimental class and control class were also compared.The result of the experiment shows that the students benefit much from the new method. Cooperative learning can improve the students’ interest, the engagement and the results of tasks. It can lay a stable foundation for further development of English and improve the score significantly. At the same time, some limitations were found in this research and we made suggestions for further research.