An Experimental Study On Cooperative Learning In Senior High School English Reading

Reading is a most important way for people to acquire information and knowledge in daily life. In senior high school teaching process, reading is the most vital and essential technique in English teaching and learning. The Standards of English Curriculum places emphasis on training and improving the students’ ability of acquiring information, handling information, analyzing and settling problems in English, especially the ability of thinking and expressing oneself based on further developing the students’ integrated competence of applying English language. However, the traditional English teaching concentrates on the teacher-centered way, which puts emphasis on teaching grammar, vocabulary and even checking the students’ examination scores. The students are usually silent, waiting to receive the knowledge given by the teacher. When English reading is being taught in class, most teachers usually conduct the teaching process by keeping speaking, explaining and translating the text sentence by sentence and even word by word. Students do nothing but take notes of what the teachers are saying mechanically. Therefore, it is natural for them to be tired of learning English and even can not read fluently after having learned it for several years. Their English reading competence is far from the requirements put forward by the Standards of English Curriculum. Therefore, there is a great need to make some changes about English teaching ways, Cooperative Learning among which is fairly practical after varieties of researches in and out of China.The author applies Cooperative Learning theory to senior high school English reading class,attempting to explore how to put Cooperative Learning into practice of promoting students’ reading ability and English language proficiency, and in the meanwhile to investigate what kinds of advantages it has for senior high school students development, and what the students’ attitudes are towards Cooperative Learning in English reading class. The experimental subjects are 106 students from two parallel classes in Grade Two of Senior High School Attached to Hebei Normal University in Hebei Province. The experimental class is Class 1, where CL approach is applied, while Class 2 is the control class, where the traditional approach is used. A pre-test and post-test were conducted to find the changes in students’ language proficiency and reading ability. Some software was used to analyze the data. In addition, questionnaires and interviews were also adopted to know about the students’ attitude towards Cooperative Learning. The result reveals that the students’ learning interests and reading competence are obviously improved with CL. Definitely, the students who become brave enough to show their own opinions and willing to help each other have gradually developed a sense of taking active part in group activities. Furthermore, they have also fulfilled their ability of seeing questions from different angles.