Research On The Application Of Cooperative Learning In The Junior Middle School Students With English Learning Difficulty Teaching

With the Decision on the Reform and Development of Elementary Education issued by the state council and the promotion of English Curriculum Standards for the compulsory education, the reform for quality-oriented education has deepened constantly. New teaching modes in the middle school’s English class suitable for the education reform trend nowadays have come into a focus. As one of the new teaching modes, cooperative learning has fully proved its advantages. Nevertheless, the research on the cooperative learning in China is still in the beginning. The Students with learning difficulty form a relatively special group which generally exists in the schools. The teachers are supposed to concern more about them, and it is one duty-bound responsibility and obligation for the educators to help them make progress. Therefore, the teaching mode of cooperative learning has been applied to experiments in the middle school’s English teaching in this research to prove its validity for fostering the progress of the students with English learning difficulty in the middle school.The subjects of the research are the 31 students with English learning difficulty from the two parallel classes of Grade Nine in the first semester(Sep, 2012-Feb, 2013) in Shijiazhuang No. 43 Middle School. The students are divided into two classes, one is experimental class, and the other is comparative class. The cooperative-learning teaching mode is adopted in the experimental class, while the traditional teaching mode is used in the comparative class. The research adopts the quantitative methods combined with the qualitative ones, including documentations, questionnaires, experiments, interviews, class observations and case studies. And it conducts the comparative and statistical analysis on the data and graphs obtained.The cooperative-learning teaching mode is found to be efficient to improve the English learning results of the students with English learning difficulty through the comparison of the post-test. The data comparison of the post-test and students’ interviews illustrate that the cooperative-learning teaching mode can significantly increase the English learning interests of the students with English learning difficulty, improve their motivations, and relieve their anxieties and fears about the difficulty. It can also have a positive influence on their sense of cooperation. All the results of the research have proved that the cooperative-learning teaching mode is valid, and it can bring some revelations to the middle school English teachers.