A Study On The Effect Of Cooperative Learning On Junior High School Students’ English Classroom Anxiety And Achievements

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education revised emotional goals and paid more attention to the cultivation of students’ emotional attitudes in English learning.Foreign language anxiety is one of the most important emotional factors affecting foreign language learning.Therefore,how to relieve students’ anxiety in English learning is a problem worthy of discussion.Many studies have shown that cooperative learning can effectively alleviate students’ English classroom anxiety so as to improve their English achievements,however,most scholars focus on senior high school students and college students and few of them take junior high school students as the research objects to further explore the effect of cooperative learning on their English classroom anxiety and achievements.Therefore,this study is conducted with junior high school students to further explore different effects of cooperative learning on students with different anxiety levels and students with different English proficiency based on investigating the current situation of their English classroom anxiety in order to provide practical inspiration and suggestions for English teachers in junior high school to know about the current situation of students’ English classroom anxiety,and adopt different teaching methods for students with different levels of anxiety and students with different English proficiency.What’s more,this study is helpful for the appropriate application of cooperative learning in English class in junior high schools.On the basis of previous studies and guided by Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development,Piaget’s constructivism learning theory and Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis,this paper focuses on the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of junior high school students’ English classroom anxiety?(2)Can cooperative learning effectively alleviate junior high school students’ English classroom anxiety? If so,how does it affect the English classroom anxiety of students with different anxiety levels?How does it affect the English classroom anxiety of students with different English proficiency?(3)Can cooperative learning effectively promote junior high school students’ English achievements while alleviating their English classroom anxiety?In order to answer the above research questions,this study is divided into two parts:the current situation investigation and the experimental research.In the part of current situation investigation,students from six classes of Grade 8 in a junior high school in Chongqing are randomly selected to collect data on their current situation of English classroom anxiety by questionnaires.SPSS25.0 is used to analyze the data.The experimental research is based on the results of the investigation.Two parallel classes,class2 and class 3,are selected from the six classes surveyed before for the teaching experiment which lasts 8 weeks.Class 2 is the experimental class which uses cooperative learning method,while Class 3 is the control class which adopts the traditional teacher-centered teaching method.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the experiment.After collecting the data of two classes before and after the experiment by means of questionnaires,English test papers and an interview,SPSS25.0 is used for data analysis.Results of the current situation investigation and the experimental research are as follows:(1)Junior high school students generally have a high level of English classroom anxiety: 1)Intermediate-proficiency students have the highest level of anxiety in English class,followed by low-proficiency students,and high-proficiency students experience the lowest level of English classroom anxiety;2)Junior high school students’ fear of negative evaluation ranks the first,followed by communication apprehension,test anxiety and English attitude anxiety.(2)Generally speaking,cooperative learning can effectively alleviate junior high school students’ English classroom anxiety,but its effects on students with different anxiety levels and students with different English proficiency are different: 1)It has the greatest impact on students with high anxiety level,followed by students with low anxiety level,and the least impact on students with average anxiety level;2)It has the greatest impact on students with intermediate English proficiency,followed by students with high English proficiency,and the least impact on students with low English proficiency.(3)Cooperative learning can promote junior high school students’ English achievements while improving their English classroom anxiety,but the effect is not significant.This study shows that cooperative learning have different impact on junior high school students with different anxiety levels and students with different English proficiency to some extent,providing pedagogical implications for English teachers in junior high schools to pay attention to different emotional needs of students with different anxiety levels and students with different English proficiency and give them certain guides according to their anxiety levels and English proficiency when they apply cooperative learning method in English class.This has realistic and practical significance.Meanwhile,this study can also provide some suggestions and precautions for English teachers in junior high schools to understand and apply the teaching method of cooperative learning,which has reference significance.