A Research Into Group Work In EFL Classroom Of Junior Middle School Based On Meaning Negotiation

The National English Curriculum Criteria advocates a student-centered interactive English teaching model and a cooperative and communicative learning way to develop students’ real language ability. Group work is an effective student-centered teaching model since it can create an easy and lively classroom atmosphere, activate students’ enthusiasm, and cultivate students’ communicative competence. Therefore, it is loved and used by many English teachers. In teaching practice, however, the implementation and effects of group work are not ideal, and group work in EFL classroom lack effectiveness. Thus, present group work is not conducive to develop students’ language ability. The “two-way communication” that meaning negotiation advocates improves the comprehensibility of language, which is good for language acquisition. Applying meaning negotiation to the classroom group work can help students acquire language effectively and improve their language communication ability by meaningful communicative activities and continuous interactive corrections.This study focuses on how to design group work effectively under the guidance of meaning negotiation in junior middle school English class so as to overcome the disadvantages of the current classroom group work and promote effective communicative interaction of language and improve students’ language communicative competence. This study tries to answer three questions specifically: 1)What is the current situation of group work in English classroom? 2) Can MN-based group work advance students’ communicative competence? 3) How do teachers design group work in classroom effectively?In order to seek the answers of questions above, the author has carried out an empirical research for two months. The subjects of research are 61 students in Class 1and 2, Grade Three of Mei Yuan Junior Middle school in Shanghai, and research methods such as experimental method, questionnaire, classroom observation are adopted. Experimental processes are as follows: in the phase of the pre-experiment,the author uses the pre-questionnaire to learn about some problems existing in thecurrent classroom group work and the students’ opinions on the group work; then during the while-experiment phase, with the problems in mind, a method of classroom observation is employed to see whether there is a positive change in students’ classroom performance after the implementation of group activities based on the meaning negotiation. In the phase of post-experiment, a post-questionnaire and post-test are used to test whether the effectiveness of classroom group activities is achieved and comprehensive language ability of students is enhanced.The post-questionnaire and the results of two examinations show that the group work based on the meaning negotiation not only advances the effectiveness of group work, but also increases students’ learning interests and learning initiatives. In addition,the author draws some valuable implications from the results for promoting meaning negotiation in group work, such as reestablishing teaching objectives,creating reasonable classroom situation, restructuring relationship between teachers and students. This study may contribute to English classroom teaching in junior middle school and help to provide teachers with reliable basis in designing the appropriate group work.