An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Cooperative Learning Upon Senior School Students' English Writing Ability

With the development of the society,English is becoming increasingly important as a communicative tool.Writing is regarded as one of the most important criteria to evaluate one's English proficiency.However,the situation of senior high school students' writing is far from satisfactory.Students are showing little or no interest in English writing.Worsely,some of them are afraid of English writing.In a traditional English class,writing training fails to get the attention they deserve.In short,students are not fond of writing while teachers don't attach importance to writing teaching.Cooperative Learning has been introduced to English classrooms for some time.Some research into the cooperation learning has been carried out in China.But most of previous studies focused on application of cooperation learning to English reading and vocabulary teaching rather than writing.Few studies on students' writing anxiety have been found.Writing anxiety may affect the writing progress,and may cause learners to suffer a lot and feel negative,acting as a barrier to the development of writing skills.Even if there are some studies concerning the effect of Cooperative Learning on writing,these studies are mostly conducted in university or college rather than in senior middle school.Based on Social Interdependence Theory,Comprehensible Output Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis,this study attempts to investigate the the effects of Cooperative Learning upon senior school Students' English writing ability.The research questions are addressed as followed:1.Can Cooperative Learning improve the writing ability of the senior school students?2.Can Cooperative Learning alleviate students' writing anxiety? If yes,to what extent does the Cooperative Learning alleviate students' writing anxiety? If not,what might be the reasons?There are totally 100 students participating in this research.49 students are in experimental class,and 51 students in control class.Cooperative Learning method is employed in the experimental class while traditional teaching method is used in the control class.Both classes use the same writing materials.Before the research,a pre-test and questionnaire 1 is carried out and after the research,a post-test and questionnaire 2 is carried out.Some students in the experimental class are chosen to have an interview after the experiment.SPSS is used to analyze the data.It has been found that using Cooperative Learning method can improve students' English writing academic achievement in senior high school.Meanwhile,Cooperative Learning method can greatly alleviate the students' writing anxiety.All in all,the application of Cooperative Learning plays a positive part in English writing class.Teachers are encouraged to apply Cooperative Learning method to English writing teaching class.Also,it is necessary to continue further study about Cooperative Learning methods.