AStudy On Cooperative Learning Applied In The English Teaching Of The Secondary Vocational School

In recent years, with the development of China’s economy, science and technology,vocational education has been experiencing a rapid advancement. The aim of the currentvocational education is to provide practical and creative talents for society, and theemployers have higher demands on students. They require the applicants not only to haveprofessional skills, but also have the spirit of teamwork. However, as the traditionalteaching method is teacher-centered, and it makes the students passive listeners, studentsare not so interested in learning English, and they don’t take an active part in Englishclasses. They neither have the confidence to speak English before the public nor haveopportunities to learn to have teamwork. Teaching with cooperative learning means thatpupils master the methods and process of cooperative learning under the teachers’guidanceso that the teaching task is finished effectively within a time limit. Nowadays cooperativelearning is widely used by the teachers of primary and middle schools in their teachingpractice. The adoption of cooperative learning in English reading classes can serve toincrease the pupils’ knowledge, stimulate their enthusiasm in class, and enhance theirawareness of teamwork and their willpower to overcome difficulties.The author applies the cooperative learning in the vocational English reading classesunder the guidance of the cooperative learning theories. The experimental subjects are twoparallel classes that are both taught by the author. Class One, the controlled class, uses thetraditional teaching method while Class Two, the experimental class, uses the cooperativegroup learning method. This study adopts three methods:1) questionnaires, which aretaken by both the two classes before the term and after the term;2) face-to-face interviews,which the author takes in three stages—before, amid and after the experiment;3)classroom teaching practice, in which the experiential class uses the cooperative learningmethod in English reading classes. The results of the data are compared between the twoclasses.The process of the study is divided into the following steps: firstly, the students are divided into several groups reasonably; secondly, to make them know the learning tasks, itis important for them to learn independently and autonomously before learning from eachother within their own group and from other groups; finally, the students should makeevaluation about their performance and the teacher should make a summary.The findings of this study indicate that cooperative learning can effectively developstudents’ interest in learning English, promote students’ engagement, and raise theirawareness of teamwork and their competence of interpersonal communication. The newteaching model of writing helps promote the reading ability of students of different Englishlevels similarly, which shows that the new model can be widely used in the English readingteaching of secondary vocational schools.