The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

English, as a communication tool, becomes more and more important because of the rapiddevelopment of the globalization. Writing is one of the four basic skills of English and itreflects students’ comprehensive English ability. So it is necessary for a language learner tomaster. When a learner wants to learn English well, he must have a certain English writingability.Some teachers abroad and at home have initially explored English writing, but most of thestudies are related with the theoretical aspect. Nowadays, teachers still use the traditionalwriting approach, that is, product writing approach based on the teacher-centered class. In theclass, first, teachers explain some writing skill. Second, teachers offer a model to students tomake students imitate it. At last, teachers ask students to hand in their papers to makecomments on them. The product writing approach has obvious defects. It plays too muchemphasis on the final product and ignores the writing process. Students have little interactionwith each other during the writing. Therefore, the writing content is poor and studentsgradually lose interest in English writing.In order to change the situation, the thesis explores a new effective English writingapproach, that is, cooperative learning approach. Cooperative learning approach abandonsdisadvantages of the traditional English writing approach, changes the present situation ofEnglish writing and improves students’ English writing ability effectively. Based on theprevious situation of English writing and cooperative learning, this paper attempts to explorethe application of cooperative learning to the teaching of English writing in senior high schoolunder the guide of cooperative learning theory. It aims at exploring an effective teachingapproach to improve students’ writing ability and providing the English teachers of senior high school with a reference. Thus, an experiment is done by he researcher. The experimentlasts about five months. There are100participants in total. The researcher puts forwardresearch questions and research hypotheses and then chooses Class One as the experimentalclass applying cooperative learning approach and Class Two as the control class using thetraditional approach in Senior Grade Two of Guan Miao High School to do a comparativeexperiment. The research questions include:(1) Whether cooperative learning can improvestudents’ writing ability?(2) Whether cooperative learning can arouse students’ writinginterest and relieve students’ writing anxiety?(3) Whether cooperative learning can improvewriting classroom atmosphere?(4)Whether cooperative learning approach is more effectivethan the traditional approach in improving students’ writing scores? The research instrumentsincluding pre-test, post-test, pre-questionnaire, post-questionnaire, observation andpost-interview are used to see whether cooperative learning approach is effective or not. As aresult, cooperative learning improves students’ writing ability, stimulates students’ interest,relieves students’ anxiety and creates a free, relaxed, affective classroom atmosphere.First, the importance of English writing, the problems of English writing, the defects ofthe traditional teaching writing approach and the significance of applying cooperative learningare introduced in this part. Second, previous research abroad and at home and cooperativelearning theory are discussed. It explains the definition, characteristics, theoretical bases andessential components of cooperative learning. Third, the writer does an experiment. Itexplains the research questions and hypotheses, subjects, research instruments, design for theexperiment and the implementation. Forth, the writer analyzes the students’ current situation.It aims to see whether the students in the two classes have significant difference. Fifth, thethesis analyzes the students’ situation after applying cooperative learning approach, comparesit with the third part and has a discussion. The writer analyzes the scores of pre-test andpost-test, the results of pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire, the observation on the writing class and the results of the interview after the experiment. According to the results inthe post-test, we can see clearly that the scores of the experimental class are higher than thecontrol class, the writing motivation is increased and the interest in writing is improvedobviously from the post-questionnaire and the post-interview. At last, the research comes tothe conclusion that cooperative learning helps to improve the students’ English writing ability,relieve students’ writing anxiety, arouse students’ interest in English writing and create a freeand relaxed classroom atmosphere. Therefore, cooperative learning approach is more effectivethan the traditional approach.