Cooperative Learning In Vocational School Oral English Teaching

Cooperative learning (CL) is a creative and effective pedagogical method with asystem of facilitating strategies. It is regarded as one of the most significant and successfulcontemporary teaching reforms (Vermette,1994; Ellis&Fouts,1997). In China, since thelate1980s, CL, with increasing recognition, has been widely investigated and applied inclassroom experiments. However, exploration of CL in vocational teaching remains at itsinitial stage, anticipating more objective empirical studies.This paper conducts an empirical study on cooperative learning in oral Englishteaching with Grade Three students at Suzhou High Vocational School. Two classes offashion design registered in2011were chosen as research subjects with33students in each;Class One was assigned as experimental class, and Class Two as control class. Theexperiment lasted one semester, approximately4months, during which the CL method wastried in Class One: The whole class was divided into8teams consisting of4-5membersfor each. The cooperative learning strategies were carried out every week, with differentspeaking tasks assigned by the author and fulfilled by the students through teamcooperation. In contrast, the conventional teacher-centered mode was still employed inClass Two, with the students finishing the task individually under the given instructions.Conducted in the experiment were two questionnaires, one on the vocational schoolstudents’ anxiety toward English speaking and the other on their employment of Englishspeaking strategies. The research data collected from the two questionnaires and the twooral tests of PETS were compared and analyzed via SPSS21.0. The findings reveal that thecooperative learning in vocational school oral English teaching can effectively lower thestudents’ speaking anxiety, help them to employ more speaking strategies and obviouslyimprove their PETS performance. The experiment and its findings are expected to providereference for further investigation in this area and for the enrichment of classroomcooperative patterns.