| Cooperative learning has been favored by academia for years,because it emphasizes that students complete the learning tasks in an atmosphere of equality and friendship through division of labor.In our country,cooperative learning has been well acknowledged and researches on this topic are also quite abundant;however,these studies focus more on the characteristics,effect and the organizational form of cooperative learning.As for how well it is accepted and applied in junior high school English reading teaching,there is not yet much discussion.Therefore,based on questionnaires and interviews,this study focused on the following two issues:,First,how do students understand,participate or evaluate cooperative learning in English reading teaching? Second,how do teachers understand,participate or evaluate cooperative learning in English reading teaching?The study found that more than 60% students understand the basic requirements of group cooperative learning.More than 80% students expressed that they know or know of the cooperative learning and would accept this way of teaching in English reading class.However,the data shows that only 53% students participate in cooperative learning,there is a big gap between self-awareness and practical results of students in cooperative learning.The questionnaire found that nearly 80% of the teachers stated that they use the cooperative teaching method,and 70% of the teachers think that the effect of cooperation teaching is better.It indicates that there might be misconducts in the teacher’s operation when applying this method of teaching,and this misconducts might have impacted students’ enthusiasm in participation;the data also shows that,in terms of grouping,most teachers would neglect the principle of “heterogeneity within the group while homogeneity between groups”;while the time allocated to the students for independent thinking before the group discussion is obviously insufficient;besides,in assigning tasks,no division of labor or ambiguous division within the group also cause problems.Furthermore,more than half of the teachers fail to give adequate evaluation about students’ learning performance,or just evaluate at the end of class,to make it worse,the evaluation is usually focused on whether students give the right answers while ignoring students’ performance during the cooperative learning;and the lack of timely and accurate feedback weakens students’ enthusiasm of participation in class activities.In view of the above problems,several suggestions are given,teachers need to continuously optimize their teaching strategies in class organization,student grouping and evaluating,and in task designing and assigning. |
