Effects Of Cooperative Learning On Junior High School Students' English Reading Self-efficacy And Reading Achievement

Many scholars have pointed out that students' reading activities are affected by many affective factors.Therefore,students' affective factors must be paid close attention to in English reading teaching.English reading self-efficacy is one of the key emotional factors affecting English reading performance.A number of researches have proven that students' English reading self-efficacy is positively correlated with his English reading performance.The stronger their English reading self-efficacy is,the better their English reading performance will be,so it is urgent to find a suitable teaching method to improve junior high school students' English reading self-efficacy,and then improve their reading achievements.Cooperative Learning is a teaching method proven to be full of interestingness and effectiveness which is different from the traditional teaching methods.Therefore,I apply Cooperative Learning to English reading teaching of junior middle schools,trying to explore the effects of Cooperative Learning on junior high school students' English reading self-efficacy and English reading achievement.There are two research questions in this study:(1)What are the effects of Cooperative Learning on junior high school students' English reading self-efficacy?(2)What are the effects of Cooperative Learning on junior high school students' English reading achievement? In order to answer these two questions,a three-month teaching experiment is conducted in which 90 students from two classes of Grade Seven in Banan Experimental Middle School in Chongqing are selected as the participants.Before and after the experiment,the students' English reading self-efficacy and their English reading performance are investigated and recorded.And software Excel and SPSS are adopted for data analysis after the teaching experiment.Findings indicate that:(1)Cooperative Learning can improve junior high school students' English reading self-efficacy effectively,the three dimensions of it — sense of competence,sense of effort and sense of setback-challenging—all also get improved significantly,and the improvement degree of sense of competence and sense of setback-challenging is slightly higher than that of sense of effort;(2)Cooperative Learning has a greatly positive impact on junior high school students' English reading achievement.Compared with the traditional English reading teaching method,Cooperative Learning can enhance junior high school students' English reading achievement more effectively.According to the findings,this study encourage English teachers to use Cooperative Learning more flexibly and frequently in future junior middle school English reading teaching,enlighten teachers to attach importance to students' English reading self-efficacy,shift their teaching ideas as well as improve teaching ability continuously.