A Study On The Effects Of English Vocabulary Instruction Based On Cooperative Learning For Ethnic Minority Students In The Senior High School

Vocabulary sustains phonetics and grammar, which is the basic unit of language and the cornerstone for learners to prompt their language levels of proficiency. The learner will not learn English well and improve his English comprehensive language application ability without abundant vocabulary and efficient vocabulary learning. In addition, The New Criteria for English Course in Senior High School puts forward higher requirement on vocabulary, namely, the vocabulary aim for Level 9 in language knowledge aims is to use 4500 approximately words and a certain number of idiomatic phrases and collocations. Therefore, the use of vocabulary must be paid more attention in vocabulary learning apart from the quantity. However, it is a tough project for the senior high school students in the ethnic minority autonomous region to achieve the aim.In such a specific situation, a class consists of at least 50 students, more than half of whom are ethnic minorities. Moreover, many of them come from remote mountainous regions. Because of confining education resources and existing objective community notion before the senior high school, their English foundation is almost nothing. Thus, how to integrate the ethnic minority students into other students in the class as soon as possible to make up for their deficiencies and how to follow the universal law of language learning to emphasize vocabulary as the first step, and then master the necessary language learning capacities with the help of their peers to narrow the gap in English learning so as to promote English academic achievements of the whole class are the questions for teachers in such teaching environment to study and explore constantly. Meanwhile, NCEC offers some teaching suggestions to teachers. For instance, ―Create a variety of cooperative activities to prompt students to learn each other, help mutually, experience the sense of group honor as well as the sense of achievements, and develop their cooperative spirit; guide students to study initiatively; assist students to form the learning method to develop their abilities; encourage students to develop their integrated language skills(listening, speaking, reading and writing) through the ways of experiencing, practicing, discussing, cooperating, exploring and so on.‖Based on what was mentioned above, the author applied the cooperative learning method to the English vocabulary learning in senior high school for the first time and 68 ethnic minority students in total in two different levels classes(Class28 is a advanced class while Class32 is an adjustment class) being taught by the author participated in the empirical study for three months. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were adopted in this study and two questionnaires, two vocabulary tests as well as personal interviews were conducted before and after the experiment to verify the research questions. SPSS version 10.0 was applied to analyze the collected data and the results shows the validity and effectiveness of applying the cooperative learning method to the vocabulary teaching.This study achieves the expected goals and effect to some extent, but the some inadequacies in the experimental method and process need to be improved.