An Empirical Study Of The Influence Of Cooperative Learning On Vocabulary Study Of Senior High School Students With Learning Difficulties

As one of the three factors of language learning,vocabulary is the foundation of language learning without which we cannot accomplish the activities of listening,speaking,reading or writing successfully.Scholars and educators both at home and overseas has paid much the attention to vocabulary and vocabulary study.The traditional way of vocabulary teaching,teacher-centered method,cannot meet the needs of the current society or stimulate the learning interest of the students.It can not meet the needs of the contemporary era,either.There are large numbers of high school students who have difficulty in English study.They find themselves in a dilemma that though they do want to have a better performance in English,the fact that they have fewer vocabularies than his classmates and they cannot keep up with the classmates blocks them to go forward in the traditional teacher-centered classes.As a newly-emerged effective way of learning,Cooperative learning,is widely spread in China from elementary schools to middle schools,especially in reading classes.The thesis mainly illustrates the empirical study that the effects of cooperative learning have on the students with learning difficulties in senior high school in vocabulary learning.Based on the theories of Zone of Proximal Development and Motivational Theory,the two questions that the thesis focuses on are 1)What effects does cooperative learning have on the learning interest of students with learning difficulties in the senior high school in vocabulary learning? 2)What effects does cooperative learning have on vocabulary learning of students with learning difficulties in the senior high school in terms of the acquisition of words?The writer selects two classes in No.1 Middle School of Anhua which is a provincial key high school and located in the remote area in Yiyang,Hunan province.The Class 443 and Class 444,are science classes in which most students cannot get 90 when the full mark is 150 in English exams.The time scale for the experiment is 3 months.Before the conduction of the experiment,the writer gauges the academic levels of the subjects on vocabulary in both classes through pretest and pre-questionnaire.The writer chooses one of the classes as the experimental class and the other the control class at random.The writer adopts the method of cooperative teaching in the experimental class,Class 443 and the traditional teacher-centered teaching method in Class 444.The teaching materials and teaching process are the same in the two classes.The performance of the students are observed and documented carefully to make a contrast on the academic level on vocabulary and their change of learning interest between them.At the end of the experiment,the writer measures the academic performance of the subjects on vocabulary and their learning interest through posttest and post-questionnaires to make a comparison if there is any differences between the students in learning interest as well as the acquisition of the vocabulary.The main findings of this thesis are that 1)cooperative learning can stimulate students' learning interest on vocabulary.2)cooperative learning has a positive effect on the students with learning difficulties in terms of the acquisition of vocabulary.The research conducted before mostly sees the students as an entity,not a group that is made up of students with different academic levels.As an English teacher from a rural senior high school where most students can not meet the requirement of the curriculum.The writer is meant to find an effective way to help those students with learning difficulties in English to have an equivalent performance with others.Considering the competence of the writer,the research of the thesis has problems as follows: 1)the number of the students involved in the study is no more than 100,which means the data collected can be a reference but cannot stand for the real performance of the whole group of students with learning difficulties in different areas of the country.2)The study focuses on the vocabulary study rather than all the aspects of the English study.Other factors such as the gender are neglected in this thesis.