Cooperative Learning In College English Classrooms

Modern society is highly competitive, but people have started to realize the importance of cooperativeness since it is part of human qualities for survival and development for modern life. However, the existing education practice emphasizes competition over cooperation, which leads to individual-oriented goals in academic life. That is, one person's success means the failure of others, and the achievement of one side is the obstacle to the other side, thus resulting in tense interpersonal relationships. How to achieve "positive interdependence", which means that the member of each group completes the group task only by means of interpersonal facilitation and cooperation. As a result, the accomplishment of one's goal benefits the others. Each learner will construct his knowledge with the help of individual accountability, active communications and collaborative learning.Cooperative learning has became a popular theory and practice in the past decade. This kind of learning is based on three theories: the group dynamics theory, the cognitive theory and the social constructivism theory. Cooperative learning emphasizes that learners should participate learning process actively and interactively and construct their knowledge with the help of each other. It not only seeks the academic objective, but also pursues the cultivation of learners' overall qualities, including the development of their personality, emotion and social skills. In cooperative learning, the role of the teacher should be changed from the controller to the designer, facilitator, participant, mediator and evaluator. The ideal realm of cooperative learning is not to pursue personal success, but rather personal improvement. It highly emphasizes the formative assessment to achieve the state of "interpersonal cooperation and intergroup competition" by changing norm reference to criterion reference.I conducted an action research on cooperative learning in my own college English Class. The research is aimed to explore three aspects of cooperative learning as below: 1) its feasibility in college English teaching, 2) its effect on changing the learners' learning behavior, attitude, cooperative awareness and ability, and 3) its effect on the teacher's self-cognition and behavior alteration. I organized thirteen small groups in my class according to the students' academic records, personalities, learning styles and the principle of "intra-group heterogeneousness and inter-grouphomogeneousness". Then, I tried to cultivate their collaborative awareness and ensure that students are taught the interpersonal and teamwork skills . The key factor is the task-design, which is in such a way that each group member should realize that he is to contribute to the task completion and to assist others. The two concepts — "base scores" and "improvement points" were introduced to evaluation of individual performance. They also made a contribution to formative assessment and individual improvement.Through the action research and data collection, the research achieved the predicted results, which showed that cooperative learning is feasible and effective when applied to current college English classes if certain conditions are satisfied. It makes learners experience the happiness of cooperation and the satisfaction of the achievement of group-oriented goals. Cooperative learning also raises the interest of learners and improves their learning results. Their cooperative awareness and ability is also improved. Besides, I, as the teacher and the action researcher, benefit a lot in this process.