A Research On The Application Of Cooperative Learning To Grammar Teaching In Junior Middle School

The New National English Curriculum requires that the focus of English education islanguage skills rather than language knowledge, but which doesn’t mean ignoring grammarteaching. Because grammar is the foundation of language form and language skills, studentscan improve their English learning effectively, only if they fully and systematically understandand master grammar. Therefore, English grammar still plays an important role in Junior MiddleSchools.However, most junior school students are poor at grammar application and teachers areconfused about the problems of time-consuming and poor efficiency in grammar teaching.Because there are significant differences between Chinese and English grammar, it’s difficultfor students to learn grammar. Besides, teachers spent much more time in explaining thegrammar rules, which makes students have less time to practice and lose their initiative andinterest in grammar learning. So teachers should spend more time and energy in finding someeffective ways on grammar teaching. CL is one of effective teaching methods.NNEC advocates the application of CL to actual classroom instruction. Besides, there hasbeen a lot of research on cooperative learning in China and abroad, which show that CL playsan active role in English teaching. For example, cooperation in learning is not only able to bebuilt among students but between students and their teacher in the process of cooperativelearning. By the means of mutual cooperation, a harmonious learning atmosphere in class willbe built, which can help students form a good mastery of the knowledge. However, there is notmuch research of applying CL to grammar teaching in junior middle school. Hence, the authortried using CL in grammar teaching in order to improve students’grammar learning.Based on the previous researches, the author made an empirical research on theapplication of CL mainly using Motivation theory and Development theory. In this research,the author puts forward the following three hypotheses:(1). Students’ interest in learninggrammar will be aroused by CL.(2). Students’grammar scores will be improved by CL.(3).CLwill make teachers change their roles and help them have more effective teaching. And subjectsin this research are80students taught by the author in Grade Two from two classes of Shanxi Modern Bilingual School. One is the experimental class using CL, and the other one is thecontrolled class using traditional grammar teaching method. The experiment lasted fromSeptember,2013to January,2014mainly through classroom teaching and learning. The authorused two questionnaires and two tests as instrument and then collected all the relative data andmade careful analysis by software SPSS17.0.The results proved that application of cooperative learning to grammar teaching in juniormiddle school was much more effective than using traditional teaching methods: Englishgrammar scores of the experiment class got the significant improvement; the students of theexperimental class have been improved greatly in learning attitudes and interest towardsEnglish grammar learning. In addition, this research also helps teachers to find better grammarteaching method.It is hoped that the thesis will bring some enlightenment for the later researchers and willbe helpful to English teaching in Junior Middle schools.