An Empirical Study On Cooperative Learning In The Year Seven’s Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is one of the three key elements of language which plays a significant role in language learning. Wilkins (1972) reported that "people could hardly express things without grammar; people could not express anything without vocabulary". Vocabulary is regarded as the basis of listening, speaking, reading, writing, translating and other cognitive activities to be carried out fluently. Thus, it is of great importance to do research on vocabulary learning. The thesis attempts to apply the cooperative learning approach to vocabulary learning in the year-7English classroom of Haibin Middle School in Shenzhen. Its purposes are to explore the impact of cooperative learning on students’motivation towards vocabulary learning and vocabulary efficiency improvement.Due to lack of effective guidance during the process of vocabulary learning, students be less motivated, and the results come to be inefficacy, the author raised two research questions:1) In what aspects is cooperative learning contributive to students’ motivation towards vocabulary learning?2) How does cooperative learning improve students’ efficiency in vocabulary learning?The author did an empirical study which lasted17weeks on Haibin Middle School of Shenzhen by adopting cooperative learning to guide Year-7’s vocabulary learning in English classroom. Class3and class4were randomly chosen as the experimental class and controlled class. First, the author has done two questionnaires simultaneously on participants to investigate the problems in vocabulary learning. It can be summarized that students mistakenly believed that rote learning could improve vocabulary and tended to rote memory. Due to inappropriate understanding and learning strategies, and the lacking of effective guidance, their learning interests began to fade away gradually. Then, an experiment was carried out to evaluate the availability of cooperative learning method on improving students’word efficiency. During the experiment, a cooperative learning as implemented with classroom observations and recorded scales. A comparison of pre-&post-test between experimental class and controlled class analyzed by SPSS19.00was made to support for this research. At last, an interview was conducted on six interviewees from experimental class to provide supplementary support for research questions. This study reached a conclusion that Year-7students’ vocabulary learning via cooperative learning approach could help to motivate students and increase the efficiency of vocabulary.