An Empirical Study On Cooperative Learning Used In NSEFC Warming-up Section Teaching

Cooperative learning is a teaching approach which is widely used at home and abroad. It aims at developing students’communicative competence and improving students’cooperative ability. In recent years, cooperative learning is closely related to language teaching, like listening, speaking, reading, writing and so on.Since2003, New Senior English for China (NSEFC) has been widely used in China. Different from former textbooks, a new section named warming-up first came out in this edition. As the first teaching section, warming-up can help students to activate prior knowledge, motivate learning interest and prepare for later study of the unit. So how to teach warming-up section well become more and more important,In order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of NSEFC warming-up teaching, the author attempted to apply cooperative learning to warming-up teaching. The thesis presents the definition of cooperative learning, relevant theories of cooperative learning, including social constructivist theory, communicative language learning theory, group dynamics theory and also the previous research on cooperative learning home and abroad. What’s more, the relationship between cooperative learning and warming-up teaching is also dealt with.In the thesis, the author carried out an empirical study on cooperative learning used in NSEFC warming-up section teaching. The main research questions are as follows:(1) what feasible methods and principles can be adopted to improve the effectiveness of NSEFC warming-up teaching?(2) what kind of benefits can students get by using cooperative learning in NSEFC warming-up section teaching?(3) what roles should the students and the teacher play in cooperative learning used in NSEFC warming-up section teaching? The author tried to find out the answers to these three questions through her study.The empirical study was carried out from March,2013to July,2013, about4months in Weinan Senior High School, Shaanxi Province. Class Two and Class Seven in Senior One were chosen as the subject. Class two was selected as the experimental class and class seven as the control class. Each class has thirty students and students’gender proportion and English levels are almost the same. The two classes shared the same teacher who is also the author of this study as well as the same teaching materials. The only difference is that in NSEFC warming-up section teaching class two was taught with cooperative learning approach but class seven was taught with traditional strategies.In the research, two questionnaires were carried out, one questionnaire was to the whole grade before the experiment and the other was to the experimental class after the experiment. In addition, two interviews were also conducted in the experiment. Students of different English levels and genders were chosen as the representatives each time to make sure the effectiveness of the result. After the experiment, SPSS19.0was used to analyze the result.According to the results of the questionnaires and the interviews, the author found out that cooperative learning is an effective teaching approach for NSEFC warming-up teaching. Cooperative learning can help to develop students’ communicative ability as well as cooperative competence. It can stimulate students’ learning interest as well. What’s more, the roles of teachers and students are totally changed in cooperative learning and student-centered class takes the place of teacher-centered class.