Research On The Effectiveness Of Cooperative English Vocabulary Learning In Senior High School

Vocabulary, as one of the three essential elements of language, is compared to the building material of language. So vocabulary learning should be taken seriously in order to learn English well. Vocabulary teaching is the important and difficult point of senior English teaching. The quality of vocabulary teaching has an effect on students’ learning curve. Only if students grasp certain words, can students effectively read, write and communicate with others in English. English education in high school is the stage where students will lay a solid foundation for further study. In order to cultivate students’ reading, writing, speaking and listening competence, the most important thing is to improve students’ vocabulary. The newly-issued senior English curriculum standard has higher requirement for vocabulary. Therefore, it is necessary to probe into more effective methods of vocabulary teaching.Cooperative learning, as a creative and effective teaching theory and strategy, has a good effect on improving the classroom’s psychosocial atmosphere, improving students’ academic performance, promoting students’ good perceived quality. It is honored as one of the most successful reforms in education. Unfortunately, very few researches that apply cooperative learning to vocabulary teaching are carried out in senior high school. This study aims to apply cooperative learning theory to guide senior English vocabulary teaching and explore a brand new way to teach senior English vocabulary. The study involves the following two major research questions:(1) Is the cooperation-oriented vocabulary teaching method more effective than the traditional method of vocabulary teaching?(2) What are the problems existing in the application of cooperative learning to vocabulary teaching?At first, A pre-test was implemented in two classes before conducting the experiment and the result showed that the English level of the two classes is almost the same. Then, the teacher carried out the experiment. The research subjects are two parallel classes in Grade Two of Xingtai No.19 middle school. The teacher applied cooperation-oriented vocabulary teaching method to teach vocabulary, while in the control class the teacher adopted traditional vocabulary teaching method. After three-month experiment, a post-test and two interviews were conducted in the experimental class and the results of pre-test and post-test would be analyzed by SPSS16.0.It was found that the students of the experimental class made significantly greater achievement than those of the control class in post-test. This shows that the cooperation-oriented vocabulary teaching method is more effective than the traditional vocabulary teaching method. However, there exist some problems in the application of cooperative learning to vocabulary teaching, for instance, students can’t clearly understand teacher’ instructions, student participation is not balanced, students lack of English communication, students make the same mistakes again and again and so on. Then the teacher and the author together think out some possible solutions by interview.The findings of this study can provide some implications for teachers and researchers in their exploring of new methods in vocabulary teaching in senior high school.