The Application Of Collaborative Learning To The Teaching Of Oral English In Junior High School

Cooperation has been one of the most important parts of social life and such activities have been attached great significance in the past. Since the second half of the 20 th century, many educationists and scholars started to work out some methods to make the best of the benefit of cooperation in teaching activities so as to improve the teaching efficiency. Therefore, there have been a large number of researchers who have investigated the application of the cooperative learning method but many of them focused on the theoretical research of the cooperative learning method. However, in this thesis, the influence of this teaching method on the students in rural junior high school is analyzed from two perspectives: both the influences on students' linguistic and non-linguistic competence are investigated so as to convince junior English teachers of the necessity of applying this method to their teaching activities.In order to make sure of the validity of this research, both an interview and a questionnaire were used to collect information about the influence of this teaching method on students' competence. First, the interview was held to investigate if the application of the cooperative learning method could have adequate influence on the linguistic competence of the students. Afterwards, the questionnaire was held to find out how the application of this teaching method influence the non-linguistic competence of the students. The objects of the interview and the questionnaire were 50 students at Grade Eight in Zhengchuan Middle School in Qin'an, Gansu. The purpose of the questionnaire was to investigate the influence of the cooperative learning method on students' non-linguistic competence while the interview aimed at finding out the influence of such a teaching method on the linguistic competence of students. Both the questionnaire and the interview were completed successfully with the cooperation of the students. Hence, much information about the cooperative learning method have been collected. Such a research led to the following conclusions:Firstly, the application of the cooperative learning method could help students in rural junior high schools to improve their ability to pronounce English words, to express themselves correctly and to communicate with others fluently.Secondly, the use of this teaching method could help students in rural junior high schools to improve their non-linguistic competence, including the competence to cooperate with others and to establish interpersonal relationship, as well as to rouse their motivation to learn English.To sum up, this research could help junior English teachers to get some enlightenment on how to make the best of the cooperative learning method to improve the oral English proficiency of the students and non-linguistic competence.