A Quasi-experimental Study On The Influence Of College English Cooperative Learning Model On Learners' Critical Thinking Disposition

Cooperative Learning(CL),as an important form of teaching,has been widely studied in China.Critical Thinking Disposition(CTD),as a stable inner trait of individuals which can potentially guide the application and behavior of critical thinking skills,has started to be a hot topic for scholars at home and abroad in recent years.The researches about the influence of CL on the CTD of college students are rare in China,therefore,the purpose of the present study was to explore the influence of CL model on participants' CTD cultivation.The present study explored the influence of CL model on the CTD of English learners.The subjects of the present study were 43 students from the same class of accounting major,who were freshmen from junior college.A total of 12 weeks of CL teaching experiments were conducted in the present study by using four units' College English reading materials.The Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CTDI)revised by Wen Qiufang(2012)was applied in the present study as the pretest and the post test to measure the status of participants' CTD before and after the experiment.Totally it has50 items.All of the CL activities in class were recorded and transcribed as the materials for the researcher to analyze the variation of participants' CTD through the experiment process.At the end of the experiment,16 subjects from eight groups were interviewed.The results were used to investigate their attitude towards CL and CTD cultivation.The three research questions are :(1)What is the effect of cooperative learning on the development of the participants' critical thinking disposition?(2)How does the participants' critical thinking disposition change through the cooperative learning experiment process?(3)What is the participants' attitude toward the use of cooperative learning and the cultivation of critical thinking disposition?On the first question,the research results showed that after 12 weeks of CL,the subjects showed different degrees of improvement on the eight sub-scales of CTD,among which the progress of cognitive maturity,truth-seeking,self-confidence and openness was significant.On the second question,the research results showed that the development of CTD varied in different reading process.Each cooperative groups presented different degree of improvement on CTD.As for the third question,the interview results showed that the method of cultivating CTD in CL mode was welcomed by the subjects;They welcomed the CL model but stressed that junior college students needed to be assisted by a teacher's whole-class instruction;Some of the subjects stated that CL had limited effect on the improvement of English proficiency.This study provided practical evidence for cultivating CTD of college students under CL model,and at the same time,provides some implication for the application of CL in College English teaching.