An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Group Cooperative Learning On English Writing Anxiety Of Non-English Majors In Vocational Colleges

Writing,as a productive skill,can reflect the students' comprehensive ability of the English language.However,many learners cannot achieve better performance in the process of English writing.Lots of researches demonstrate that a number of factors including traditional teaching approaches,emotion-related factors and so on exert significant influence on English writing.But anxiety,as a prominent affective factor,has been paid much attention to in the research on English writing instruction since the 1980 s.Many researchers assume that writing anxiety is closely related to learners' poor English writing achievements.Therefore,many instructional approaches,including recitation input,length approach and so on,are applied to alleviate students' English writing anxiety.It is no doubt that each approach mentioned above is effective in the reduction of English writing anxiety to a degree.However,vocational students have unique characteristics so that the instructional methods mentioned above may not have the same effects when employed in teaching practice.Vocational students have unique features:(1)vocational students' writing level is much lower than undergraduates' writing level.Thus they may feel more upset,depressed,even disgust,when it comes to English writing;(2)most vocational students tend to be more skeptical about themselves than undergraduates because of their previous unsuccessful English writing performance;(3)Because of the control of the teacher and self-doubt,most vocational students tend to be more nervous about sharing their thoughts with others than undergraduates when asked how to write excellent English compositions.Group Cooperative Learning,featured learners-oriented,originated in the 1970 s in America.It is commonly regarded as creative,pragmatic instructional theory and strategy system.It puts much emphasis on group members' cooperation within small groups for maximum of their own and each other's learning,positive interdependence and face-to-face promotive interaction.With the maximum of their common writing performance,students' writing achievement may be improved.As a result,they may not feel upset when writing English composition.What's more,positive interdependence emphasizes mutual achievements and shared rewards,leading to the improvement of mutual self-confidence.Last but not the least,with the usage of Group Cooperative Learning,students work together within small groups via mutual help and encouragement rather than write English compositions under the control of teachers,which finally makes students become willing to communicate with other students.Taking vocational students' unique characteristic and the present situation of vocational students' writing into consideration,the author intends to investigate the influence of Group Cooperative Learning on vocational students' writing anxiety.In more specific,this thesis intends to explore the following three questions:(1)What is general level of vocational students' writing anxiety?(2)Can the application of Group Cooperative Learning effectively alleviate vocational students' writing anxiety?(3)Can vocational students hold positive attitudes toward Group Cooperative Learning after the experimental research?The author conducted 16-week experimental study in Shandong College of Electronic Technology.Eighty students majoring in computer(freshmen)from two parallel classes are selected for the teaching experiment.One class is chosen as the experimental class at random in which Group Cooperative Learning is employed as a teaching approach.Whereas,another class is regarded as the control class in which students only learn the same material carefully selected by the author.The research instruments include Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory,which is designed by Cheng,two writing parts of CET-4 and the follow-up interview.The date collected both before and after the experiment is put into SPSS for analysis.The research results demonstrate that:(1)the mean score of almost each item is higher than 3.5 revealing high frequency.Thus,vocational students suffer from a high level of English writing anxiety(2)vocational students' English writing anxiety of the experimental class has been greatly alleviated after the experiment while there has been a little change in that of the control class.Thus Group Cooperative learning is effective in alleviating vocational students' writing anxiety.(3)the data from the interview also indicates that Group Cooperative can effectively alleviate vocational students' writing anxiety and shows that vocational students benefit from the approach a lot.Thus vocational students hold positive attitude toward Group Cooperative Learning.The findings of this thesis verify that Group Cooperative Learning is workable and effective in the alleviation of vocational students' writing anxiety.Besides,the author also points out some pedagogical implications for English writing teaching.However,the thesis has many limitations at the same time.In view of limitations of the present research,the author puts forward some suggestions for further researches.