An Experimental Study On The Effective Group Construction Of The Spoken English Classroom Based On The Learning Style Of Junior High School Students

Cooperative learning has been paid much attention to by experts and scholars both outside and inside China. Recently, it has been widely applied in EFL teaching,especially in spoken English teaching which needs a large amount of language communication. How to help students improve the effectiveness of cooperative learning as well as the spoken English ability has become an important project of researchers.Learning style is a key element that affects students' tendency of study and the choice of learning strategies. It has a special characteristic of flexibility in certain environment. Scholars at home and abroad have realized the importance of learning styles and point out that teaching styles should match learning styles. Recently, some researchers pointed out that teachers should help students develop more learning styles to enrich the channels to acquire a language. According to Socio-cultural theory,interaction can improve students' development of skills and knowledge. Cooperative learning provides a special learning environment which enables students to interact and communicate with each other more easily and frequently. In the process of interaction, students can have more opportunities to observe and imitate others' strategies which are more effective to learn or acquire language skills. It is believed that cooperative learning is an important way of developing students' learning styles.But the application of cooperative learning to the development of learning styles is often neglected by many researchers as well as teachers at schools.This thesis attempts to make an experimental study to optimize the construction of cooperative groups which helps to improve students' spoken English proficiency and at the same time enlarge the scale of their learning style preferences. To be more specific, three research questions in this thesis are listed as below:1. How do different patterns of group divisions based on learning styles influence the effectiveness of the students' cooperative activities, spoken Englishproficiency, and the development of the students' new learning styles?2. What pattern of group division based on learning styles is the most effective for students' cooperative activities, their spoken English proficiency, and their development of new learning styles?In this thesis, 80 students in the author's two parallel classes in Grade 7 are chosen as the subjects. The author divided these students into 20 groups according to four kinds of Kinsella's perceptual learning styles and Oxford's extroverted and introverted learning styles. These 20 groups are divided into 5 experimental groups based on 5 patterns of group construction. Each experimental group has 4 small groups. Among these 5 patterns of group construction, two of them are style homogeneous groups(homogeneous perceptual style + introverted, homogeneous perceptual style + extroverted), while the rest of the three patterns are style heterogeneous groups(heterogeneous perceptual style + introverted, heterogeneous perceptual style + extroverted, heterogeneous perceptual style + introverted +extroverted). This study adopted a test for equal groups contrast to measure each group's performance on the effectiveness of the students' cooperative activities and spoken English proficiency, and the development of the students' learning styles. This experiment lasted 12 weeks and each week contains 5 cooperative spoken English trainings with the tasks matching the students' learning styles.In order to ensure the integrity of the data, the author designed a set of research procedure as follows: the first questionnaire on the students' learning styles, pre-test on the effects of cooperative learning and spoken English proficiency, the first 6weeks cooperative learning and teaching experiment, the post-test 1, the last 6 weeks cooperative learning and teaching experiment, the Post-test 2, the second questionnaire on the students' learning styles and one interview at the end of the teaching experiment. All the collected data are put into a computer and analyzed by the SPSS 19.0 with the Paired Sample T- test and one-way ANOVA.The study results show that: 1. Different patterns of group formation based on learning styles affect the students' performance in their group work, the students' scores of spoken English tests and learning style preferences. According to the results of the analysis, the groups with extroverted students have better performance in cooperative learning activities, and they also do better in spoken English tests. Theones with homogeneous perceptual style and extroverted learning style perform best.However, the groups with heterogeneous perceptual learning styles have more positive influence on the development of learning styles. On the other hand, when all the group members have homogeneous perceptual learning styles and introverted learning styles, the performance on the effectiveness of the students' cooperative activities, spoken English proficiency, and the development of the students' learning styles are the worst. 2. Accordingly, extroverted groups with heterogeneous perceptual styles perform better in the effectiveness of cooperative activities, spoken English proficiency, and the development of the students' learning styles is a relatively scientific way of group formation.According to the study results, the following conclusions can be drawn: when forming a cooperative group in spoken English class, teachers should not only consider the academic achievement of students but also take learning styles into consideration. Extroverted groups with heterogeneous perceptual styles is a relatively scientific way of group formation which perform better in effectiveness of cooperative activities, spoken English proficiency, and the development of the students' learning styles. The groups with all the members introverted especially with homogeneous perceptual learning style should be avoided in the construction of cooperative groups.This indicates that teachers should be aware of the students' learning styles.