An Investigation Of Teachers’ Organization Of Group Work In Senior Middle School English Classes And Students’ Views Of It

In recent years, cooperative learning has already become the main trend of English teaching, while the group work activity, as one of the major forms of the cooperative learning, attracts more and more attention from the public. The application of cooperative learning and group work in English language teaching has already been researched by many scholars from different perspectives. Previous studies mainly laid emphasis on the impact of cooperative learning on students’ different language skills, such as the reading, writing and speaking but there are few studies on how teachers organize group work activities and the implementation of group activities. In this research, the organization of group work by senior middle school English teachers is studied, and students’ attitude towards the organization of teachers is investigated correspondingly.In order to carry out an in-depth study on senior middle school English teachers’ organization and students’ reflections on the organization current situation, three instruments are applied in the research, including, questionnaires, classroom observation and interviews.Wide-range investigations are carried out for senior middle school English teachers and students by giving out substantial questionnaires, for the further understanding of teachers’ organization of group activities and students’ opinions on the organization. Around 200 English teachers and 500 students of senior middle schools in Hebei provinces are randomly chosen to fill in the questionnaires.37 videos of English classes in a Xingtai senior middle school are observed and analyzed. The organization processes of teachers are summarized and classified in a certain way to make the observation scale. After coding those videos of classes from C1 to C37, observation results are got and corresponding records are taken, for reflecting the organization of group work thoroughly.At the same time, the data is collected with EpiData software, and then the SPSS13.0 software is applied to calculate the percent of every choice of each item in questionnaires.In order to ensure the comprehensiveness of the investigation results, interviews are also carried out for two different groups, namely teachers and students. 20 teachers who appear in the 37 videos of English classes are interviewed, and then 40 students are interviewed. They are randomly chosen from those teachers’ classes(2 students are chosen from each class).The research findings are as follows: although the group work has been carried out in many English classrooms in some schools, there still exist some problems. Before the group work, the preparation is not enough. Some teachers do not offer necessary guidance and background information to students and fail to make an appropriate arrangement for group activities. During the group work, majority of teachers cannot control the rhythm of group work. After the group work, in the process of evaluation, a large amount of teachers emphasize learners’ acquiring knowledge but ignore the cultivation of learners’ cooperative consciousness and ability.It is hoped that the research enable teachers to have more objective and comprehensive understandings of their organizations of group work activities so as to facilitate them to give full play to advantages and cast off disadvantages of group work organization in English classroom. It is also hoped that the research can be used as references for English teaching in senior middle school, especially for English teaching practice concerning group work.