Teaching Grammar In The Framework Of Cooperative Learning

For a long time, grammar translation method has been favored among English teachers in senior high school's grammar teaching because of its advantages in cultivating students' sound linguistic competence, especially analysing and translating. However, with the development of education, its disadvantages appear gradually. In the traditional grammar classes, teachers spend quite a lot of time on lecturing, as a result of which students have few opportunities to take part in class activities and they just receive knowledge passively and individually. Memorizing grammar rules and drilling sentence patterns is the main way to master grammar knowledge. The lack of communication in the traditional classroom makes the atmosphere of it depressing and the mechanical way of learning cause students loose their interest in learning grammar. These not only fail to develop students' practical ability of language use but also violate rules of language learning. Cooperative learning has been regarded as a breakthrough against traditional classroom instruction, and through the application of it students students' creativity, consciousness of collectivism and cooperation will be promoted. For its advantage in arousing the atmosphere of classroom, stimulating students' motivation and improving students' academic achievement, cooperative learning has been widely applied in the teaching of English.In order to improve the circumstance of grammar teaching in senior high school, the author tries to apply cooperative learning in it which aims to cultivate students' awareness and ability of cooperation, change their learning attitude and behavior of learning and improve their academic achievement.Based on the theory of cooperative learning and combined with the feature and practice of grammar teaching in senior high school, the research is an experimental research. Instead of being a passive knowledge receiver and studying independently, students are divided into groups to learn grammar. The group members consult, collect, and select all kinds of information around one grammar point at first, after discussion they should draw a conclusion within groups, and then discuss it with other groups until they get a conclusion that the whole class agree, and the teacher gives some complements at last. The research gets the feedback through questionnaire, tests and interview and the results show that cooperative learning plays a significant role in reducing students' anxiety, arousing their learning motivation, changing their attitude and behavior and improving their academic achievement, which proves that cooperative learning is feasible and effective.