The Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Reading Instruction In Senior High Schools

The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools regards the cultivation and development of students' reading literacy as an important path to effectively achieve the goal of discipline education.Therefore,reading literacy,as the essential character and key ability of the students in senior high schools,will certainly attract the English educators' attention.However,most of the senior high school English reading classes are still dominated by teachers' one-way infusion of basic language knowledge,with students' passive language output under control,lacking in the presentation of theme meaning and the efficient training of students' reading skills,difficult to fully reflect students' subjectivity and creativity,so that students tend to lose interest in reading,form poor reading habits,get weak reading comprehension ability and so on.Consequently,such an inefficient reading teaching method is hindering the cultivation and development of students' reading literacy.This research attempts to construct the cooperative learning reading teaching model in order to improve the present situation of senior high school English reading instruction,with the cooperative,exploratory,student-centered English learning activity view advocated by The New English Curriculum Standards as the guideline,based on the related theories of cooperative learning and reading teaching,inspects the effect of the cooperative learning on cultivating students' reading literacy,namely reading ability and reading character,and further makes out the students' emotional attitudes towards cooperative learning by using reading comprehension tests,questionnaires and the interview.The study adopted the experimental method and lasted for 4 months.The students of two parallel classes in grade two from a senior high school in ZJ city were selected as the research objects.The control class adopted the bottom-up reading teaching model,while the cooperative learning reading teaching model was adopted in the experimental class.Before the experiment,the two classes were given one reading comprehension test at the same time,and one questionnaire survey was conducted in the experimental class to understand the current situation of readingteaching so as to provide references for the design and implementation of the experiment.After the experiment,the two classes were given the other reading comprehension test simultaneously.The other questionnaire and the interview were administered to the experimental class in order to examine the effect of applying cooperative learning to English reading instruction.The effect on students' reading ability was examined by using both reading comprehension tests and questionnaires,and the effect on students' reading character was inspected by using questionnaires.After adopting Excel and SPSS21.0 software to statistically analyze the pre-test and post-test data,the study can draw the following conclusions:(1)The application of cooperative learning to English reading instruction can improve students' reading ability.Before the experiment,there was no significant difference in reading achievement between the experimental class and the control class.After the experiment,the average reading score of the experimental class was2.04 points higher than that of the control class.The independent sample test of the post-test scores of the two classes found that the P value was 0.02,indicating that there was a significant difference in reading ability between the two classes,and the reading ability of the students in the experimental class is higher than that of the control class.The average score of the post-test of the experimental class was 2.68 points higher than that of its pre-test.The independent sample test of pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental class found that the P value was 0.003,indicating that the reading ability of the students in the experimental class was improved a lot after the experiment.According to the self-assessment survey results of students' reading ability after the experiment,it is found that most of the students in the experimental class have efficiently improved their reading comprehension ability,expanded their language knowledge and enhanced their cultural cognition ability through taking part in the reading activities with cooperative learning.(2)The application of cooperative learning to English reading instruction can promote students' sound reading character.Through the statistics and analysis of the related data of students' reading character questionnaire after the experiment,it is found that cooperative learning have brought rich reading experience to the studentsin the experimental class.86% of the students thought that group cooperation and communication improved their interest and confidence in reading.All the students mentioned the time spent on English reading each day was increasing and 92% of those thought cooperative learning was conducive to form their better reading habits.(3)The students subjectively hold approval and positive emotional attitudes towards the application of cooperative learning to English reading instruction,who believe that cooperative learning brings them a great deal of autonomous study space,which not only can fully mobilize their reading and learning initiatives,but also can help to enhance their cooperative awareness and skills.Therefore,the application of cooperative learning to senior high school English reading instruction is conducive to comprehensively improve students' reading literacy.This study also proposes some reasonable countermeasures to the problems occurred in the practice of the cooperative learning reading instruction,namely teachers to flexibly shift multiple roles and accurately grasp the relationship between themselves and students,to implement timely and sufficient cooperation learning,to pay close attention to students' individual differences and give students appropriate evaluation and feedback in time,etc,hoping to provide our English educators with some useful experience.