Empirical Research Of Cooperative Learning In The Rural Senior High School's Exercise Classes

In China, the English teaching quality of our rural senior high school is poor, and it is a difficult task to improve the teaching quality steadily. In the May 19, 2001 State Department also made the decision of reform and development of foundation education:"encourage cooperative learning(CL), enhance mutual communication between students, develop each other together, and promote the development of learning and teaching."In fact, in addition to the reform of teaching course and textbook, the most important is the reform of teaching philosophy. Recently, the new curriculum reform of secondary schools in the developed cities is implemented well, so that English teaching has undergone a fundamental change. However, there are many problems in the application of cooperative learning in the rural senior high school which has poor infrastructure and shortage of teachers. At present, the teachers in the distant rural senior high school know a little about the cooperative learning, and under the guidance of the textbook they try to use this approach only in the new lesson. However, in the critical exercise class teacher still use the traditional teacher-centered mode, and neglect the classroom atmosphere. At the same time, most students are used to listening rather than thinking by themselves what to learn and how to learn. In the Rural Senior High School's(RSHS's) English exercise class, the application of the traditional teaching method had no significant effect on improving students'ability. For this situation to carry out pratice-based language teaching approach"cooperative learning"will certainly make up for the demerits and provide strong support for carrying out comprehensive teaching. Cooperative learning is such a learning method that students work together to achieve their assignment or shared goal. Within cooperative activities, individuals seek outcomes that can be beneficial to themselves and beneficial to all group members.The author launched with the basis of educational theory and theoretical foundation of cooperative learning, and combined with the actual conditions of the English exercise class of the rural senior high school, then futher elaborated on the great significance of the effective cooperation. The author wants to do an experiment in Grade One in No.2 Senior High School of Xiongyue from September, 2010 to January 2011 to test if CL is effective in English exercise teaching. In order to do this empirical research, the author chose two classes. The cooperative teaching approach is used in the experimental class(EC), while the traditional teaching methods are still used in control class(CC). Each lesson is 45 minutes, and both of them are monitored together. Firstly, the author did a comprehensive analysis both in qualitative and quantitative methods has been conducted on the questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. All the responses to the interview came from the students in EC. By the quantitative analysis of the responses, we have got the students'views on CL.The results indicate that the CL in exercise class for students can do well in their language learning so that students have conspicuously improved their learning ability through doing all kinds of group activities related to the real world. Most of students in EC have learned English in a quite happy way so as to have confidence in English learning and finally to promote the students English level. Students generally have the eagerness to succeed in completing the activity with the help of each other under the atmosphere of support and democracy and have raised the spirit of cooperation. It is feasible to apply CL in the rural senior high school's exercise class. Owing to the limitations of the study, there still remain many practical problems, which call for teachers'and researchers'attention and endeavor for further research so that more effective methods will be found out for teaching of English exercise in the future.