An Empirical Study On The Cooperative Learning In Junior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Recently, as the difficult point and key point of junior school English teaching, vocabulary teaching has been given increasing emphasis. Vocabulary learning qualities of junior school students have a direct effect on the development of their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. However, there exists a universal phenomenon, that is, vocabulary teaching is time-consuming and low efficient. Most teachers still follow the traditional way in teaching vocabulary, featuring that teachers explain the words and students listen and write, which fails to improve students’ learning interests and cultivate their vocabulary learning qualities. In addition, the new English Curriculum Standards advocates that students and their development are supposed to be given attention in teaching. English teaching should shed light on students’ subjective position in learning process. Furthermore, students’ emotion and lifelong learning abilities ought to be laid stress on in learning. Cooperative learning has played its positive role in enhancing students’ academic performance, boosting students’ non-cognitive development and improving social psychological atmosphere in class. However, the application of cooperative learning mode in junior school English vocabulary teaching is not general. In this thesis, the author has applied cooperative learning mode into junior school English vocabulary teaching, hoping to improve students’ vocabulary learning quality, and at the same time to cultivate students’ cooperative,competitive consciousness and collective values, as well as improve their creativity, information-searching abilities and cooperative capabilities.The subjects of the research were the 40 students from Class 6 and 40 students from Class 5 of Grade 7 in NO.29 Junior High School, Anshan City, Liaoning Province. Class 5 was the control class taught by employing the traditional vocabulary teaching model. Class 6 was the experimental class who was taught in the cooperation-based vocabulary learning model. The two classes were taught by the same teacher-the author of this paper. In the process of the research, the author adopted questionnaire, interview, tests and classroom experiment, which lasted about three and a half months.According to the collection data, the author made the conclusions:cooperative learning, the group learning in vocabulary teaching and learning can not only arouse students’ learning initiative and interest, improve their learning performance, activate the class learning atmosphere but also can develop their learning ability in vocabulary learning.However, because of the limitations of the number of the subjects and the experimental time, the efficiency, practicality, and feasibility of cooperative learning need further exploration.