A Study On The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Listening Teaching Invocational School

Listening is one of the four basic skills, it should be mastered in the course of learning any language, and it is the major skill for students to develop language communicative competence and improve their ability of using English in practice. Many scholars pay attention to the effective listening teaching methodologies, they try to improve students’ listening competence by them and get the wonderful English listening teaching results. And the cooperative learning is one of the effective listening teaching methodologies.Cooperative learning, which is promoted by Slavin, Johnson et al in America, is mainly a kind of class techniques that encourages students to undertake all kinds of learning activities cooperatively in small groups. It stresses the learner-centered class, in which the teacher plays the role of director, supervisor and helper, and students help each other to be rewarded for the achievements or performances of the entire group. Thereby it reduces the pressure on the students, promotes students’ initiative and develops their sense of cooperation and the spirit of innovation.The research explores the effects of the application of cooperative learning on students’ listening proficiency and interests in English listening teaching. What’s more, the differences between the heterogeneous group and the homogeneous group in cooperative learning are also explored. The author randomly chooses two classes with 51 students as the research participants from the Chaoyang Vocational School, in Liaoning Province. One class is selected as the control class, while the other is chosen as the experimental class. During 16 weeks experiment, the control class adopts the traditional English listening teaching approach, and the cooperative listening approach is applied in experimental class. The research attempts to answer the following questions:(1) Is CL approach in improving students’ English listening interests better than the traditional teaching approach?(2) Is CL approach more helpful for students to improve their listening proficiency compared with traditional teaching approach?(3) Are the changed scores of listening tests in heterogeneous groups different from homogeneous groups?Through using SPSS11.5 to analyze the data that collect from pre-test, post-test and questionnaire, the research results can be found:(1) The CL approach to teaching English listening can stimulates students’ interests and arouses their enthusiasm in listening.(2) It is proved that the CL approach can improve students’ English listening proficiency more effectively compared with the traditional English listening teaching approach.(3) In cooperative learning, the changed scores of listening tests in heterogeneous groups are different from homogeneous groups. The heterogeneous group can improve students’ listening scores more effectively than homogeneous group. So dividing students into the heterogeneous groups can get a better result in a period of time.This research confirms the effectiveness of cooperative learning in the teaching English listening, but also for students to find a feasible approach of learning English listening.