A Study On The Effects Of Cooperative Writing In High School English Teaching:a Comparison Of Groups And Pairs

English writing is a kind of language output skill.Students,especially those of low proficiency,find it difficult to master this skill.However,previous studies indicate that cooperative writing(groups or pairs)has some advantages.It not only helps students study together but also solves some language problems.Besides,it can motivate their interest and motivation.However,it remains to be seen whether different ways of grouping(group vs.pair)and learners' English proficiency have any differential impacts upon the effectiveness of cooperative writing.For this reason,the present study attempts an empirical study on the effects of grouping and learners' proficiency upon senior high school students' writing on accuracy,fluency and complexity within the framework of cooperative writing.The study was based on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory,Social constructivism,Interaction hypothesis.Fifty students were selected from Qinan NO.5 middle school as experimental subjects who were divided into two groups.They are high proficiency and low proficiency.They completed a composition about college entrance examination in a certain period of time.The experiment uses SPSS(19 Edition)to carry on the data statistics.The main research instruments are Test and Raters.The two experimental problems adopt different research methods.The first problem used Mann Whitney U test.The result showed that there was a big significance between different cooperative styles and proficiency on accuracy(grammar errors)(U=174,P=0.01).The second problem used Two-factor Variance Analysis Method to check whether there exists interaction effect between different cooperative styles and proficiency on accuracy,fluency and complexity.The result showed that different cooperative styles and proficiency are interactive on accuracy(grammatical errors: P=0.024 and lexical errors: P=0.030)and complexity(T-Units: P=0.026),especially the students with low proficiency in groups.The study can provide at least two pedagogical implications.On the one hand,when constructing a composition in groups and pairs,students in groups are improved better than those in pairs.On the other hand,no matter what group styles there are,the high proficiency students have a good performance.Besides,the low proficiency students in groups could produce better learning results than those in pairs.In some cases,the interaction pattern of the learners might be influential on learners' language learning.