Research On The Application And Countermeasure Of Cooperative Learning In Oral English Teaching In Rural Junior Middle Schools

Improvement of oral English teaching method in rural junior middle schools will help students enhance their oral communicative competence and meet the needs of study and employment in future.The research on oral English teaching in junior high school has a long history and a large number of scholars have produced amount of books,dissertations and papers on it.For example,Zhang Wenyu(2014)combines basic oral skills training with cooperative learning which has improved students' consciousness of participation,cooperation ability and oral ability.However,they do not pay enough attention to the research on teaching method and teaching design of rural junior middle school in terms of the characteristics of rural teachers and students.The present paper will propose a relative new teaching approach by combing the Cooperative Learning Method and the Constructivist Learning Theory based on the present situation of oral English teaching in rural middle schools.We examine the problems and causes of oral English teaching in rural middle schools of China by taking Liutuan Middle School in Yanshou county as an example,discuss the development of the teaching method of combining oral English teaching with cooperative learning.It will hopefully provide a constructive reference for oral English teaching in rural middle schools in China.The Cooperative Learning Method was proposed by scholars of the United States in the 1970 s.They suggest that students in teaching can be divided into groups so that they can learn from each other and complement each other.Based on the relationship between cooperative learning and teaching,some teaching methods have appeared one after another,such as the Team-Games-Tournament(TGT)and the Learning Together(LT)and so on.In the present paper,we have conducted a half-year study in Liutuan Middle School,draw a conclusion to the problems by investigating teachers and students and observing the teaching process in class.And based on the Cooperative Learning Theory and the views of knowledge,learning,teaching and teaching model of the Constructivist Learning Theory,the corresponding strategies were put forward.The paper makes a quantitative and qualitative research on Liutuan Middle School and finds out the following problems:Firstly,students' pronunciation and intonation of oral English is not standard enough because of the influence of Northeast dialect.Secondly,students' vocabulary is not rich enough to meet the basic needs of oral communication.Thirdly,students' grammatical and semantic abilities are not good enough."Chinglish" appears in oral English.Fourthly,oral English teaching mode is more traditional,communication and interaction are not frequent.Fifthly,students have psychological barriers which hinder them in expressing fluently in English.With the consideration of these problems,we put forward the following teaching strategies by the combination of the Constructivist Learning Theory and the Cooperative Learning Method as well:Firstly,improve students' pronunciation and intonation by imitation of different roles in role play teaching class.Secondly,choose the suitable words,organizing group games and memorizing words will help increase students' vocabulary.Thirdly,improve the students' grammatical expression ability,strengthening the original sentence pattern practice and enriching the new grammatical sentence pattern.Fourthly,construct the supporting and anchoring teaching mode of oral English for rural junior middle school students.Fifthly,improve students' psychological quality,use situational teaching to imitate dialogue and fill in phrases and sentences to select appropriate topics.The present research has certain theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,the paper discusses the Cooperative Learning Method and Constructivist Learning Theory in depth and combines it with oral English teaching effectively,which will help enrich the practicality of the theories.Practically,applying Cooperative Learning Method to rural oral English teaching and putting forward some teaching strategies are of guiding significance to rural oral English teaching.The improvement of teach method in rural English class will be beneficial in enhancement of rural students' oral communicative competence.