A Cooperative Approach To Improving Junior High School Students’ Learning Motivation And Learning Scores

As the communication and cooperation between the countries is thriving, the mastery of English is one of the basic requirements for the 21st century talents. English learning to a great extent is closely related with students’ learning motivation. By taking initiative to learn and good advantage of learning strategies, students can achieve more satisfying outcomes. Therefore, how to guide students to find suitable learning strategies to improve their learning motivation is our educators’ top priority. Countries all around the world advocate "student-centeredness" in teaching, implying that teaching should benefit for students’ development, especially the development of students’ competence. The New English Curriculum Standard for the junior high school maintains that teaching purpose is to inspire and cultivate the students’ interest in learning, to help students build self-confidence, to develop good study habits, to develop the ability of autonomous learning and to form effective learning strategies. To realize this goal, the educators must adopt cooperative learning teaching style that features "student-centeredness", catering to students’ needs to create a harmonious, pleasant and democratic learning environment according to individual differences. However, many teachers at present still stick to the traditional cramming method of teaching, and seriously stifle the enthusiasm of the students’ English learning, leading to students’rote learning in English and students’lack of learning motivation. Thus, it is quite necessary to do empirical research on the effect of cooperative learning on learning motivation and English achievements of junior high school students. This study aims to explore how the cooperative learning approach influences middle school students’English learning motivation and learning results. Based on the findings, the author came up with some proposals for English teaching, so as to take the students as the center to promote their long-term development.For this goal, the author of this paper took two classes of Grade 8 as the subjects, teaching one class by using the cooperative learning approach, and the other by using the traditional teaching approach. The pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaire was respectively done to master the change of students’ learning motivation. Using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences 17.0 to do statistics analysis, the author found that the students of the experiment class showed a stronger motivation (integrative motivation, instrumental motivation, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation), especially the integrative motivation and intrinsic motivation, than the students of control class before the experiment, and their academic performance is relatively high. Correlation analysis found that learning motivation and learning achievement significantly correlated, that is, cooperative learning mode did inspire junior high school students’ learning motivation, and improve the students’ academic performance. According to the analysis result, all types of motivation on students’ English learning to a certain extent, especially the integrative motivation and intrinsic motivation. A variety of combined types of motivation is better than single learning motivation can effectively promote students’ English learning.As the result shows, cooperative learning approach works better than traditional teaching methods in that it stimulates students’ learning motivation by more effectively cultivating students’ ability of autonomous learning and cooperative learning.