On Implementing Differentiated Instruction Through Cooperative Learning In Junior High School English Teaching

Owning to the rapid progress of our era, the coverage of education is becoming larger and larger and students’individuality began to be closely watched. In addition, with the implementation of China’s Basic Education Curriculum Reform, students’ individual difference has become increasingly obvious. Therefore, students can not be treated as the same ones whether in the aspects of cultural background, personality, learning interest, knowledge level and so on. New Curriculum promoted that "Teachers should respect the personalities of students, care for individual difference, satisfy different needs of each student, and make each one fully get development". However, in real English class, most of teachers take such a strategy:teaching to the average students. Thus students’non-intellect characters and individual differences are neglected. Given this situation, differentiated instruction (DI) is imperative. So what is DI? It refers to according to the fact that students’are individually different, teachers manage to adapt instructions to multiple abilities, admitting that not all students are the same. And they also have to consider students as the individual learners, acknowledging their difference as well as respecting them, thus they can get a full development.However, in practical implementation, in order to make DI effective, it is not enough just by relying on the teacher to take care of the students’differences and meet the special needs of them. This situation requires teachers to take another measure. That is:Differentiated instruction acts in concert with cooperative learning (CL). This is also one of the various models of differentiated instruction.Differentiated instruction and cooperative learning are both two popular teaching patterns nowadays, but it is rare to meet the integration of the two. In this paper, the author chooses the exploration of differentiated instruction on account of the group cooperative learning. In order to prove the feasibility of this kind of teaching mode and its implementation, the author spent one semester in conducting an experimental research. Under the same condition of the two classes, the author chose one class as the experimental group, while the other class as the control group. For the experimental class, the author carried out DI based on CL in English class. For the control group, traditional approach is used. By adopting the means of questionnaires, interviews, classroom practice as well as the comparative analysis of students’performance in pre-test and post-test, the author concludes the following respects:①The basic knowledge level could be promoted substantially through cooperativelearning;②Students’interest in cooperative learning can be improved;③Students’learning initiative is raised significantly;④Some students’leadership could be elaborated adequately;⑤Teamwork spirit is enhanced during this process.Therefore, the experiment indicates that cooperative learning is indeed one of effective modes of differentiated instruction. What’s more, this thesis will have a further study on the efficient and specific strategies in implementing this model.