| Over the years,"being difficult to teach English" and "being difficult to learn English" has been the problems which English teachers and students from rural high school have. Compared with urban high school, with the limited hardware and software conditions the classroom teaching is still teacher-centered, the students are the passive recipients. This results in rural high school students’generally low English level, and they dislike learning English and even give up learning it, which becomes more serious. Their learning English enthusiasm is not so high, which causes lower scores, especially in listening and speaking, because of lacking in English-speaking environment, their skills are even worse. As one of the main ways of rural middle school students’English learning, the school classroom teaching plays a very important role. According to the above phenomenon, the author think we need to try to use a strategy which is more suitable for their English learning, so as to improve their interest in learning English, change their attitude towards English-learning, develop better English learing habit, then they can get high scores in the examination.The new English curriculum standard (experimental edition) advocates practice, participation, experience, cooperation, communicative approach and task-based teaching, stressing the learner’s life experience, interest, and cognitive level, in order to achieve the objectives of developing students’comprehensive language ability. Cooperative learning is a new kind of teaching theory and strategy rising in the1970s. Cooperative learning is a form of students’learning in small groups through mutual aid and mutual relying activities. Under the teacher’s guidance, some learning tasks are to be finished so as to promote students’positive development in cognition, emotion and attitude. The purpose of the thesis is to test the effects of cooperative learning in English classroom teaching from the rural high school, and attempts to explore effective specific operation steps. In this thesis, the main questions we study are whether cooperative learning is suitable for the rural large class English teaching with poor teaching conditions and students’low English level, whether cooperative learning is to help improve their English learning skills and habits, and whether cooperative learning is to improve rural high school students’enthusiasm of learning English and their scores.Theory of this study is based on cognitive theory and social interdependence theory. The research object is rural high school students from Class1005and Class1006in Grade Two, No.11Middle School, Hunan Liuyang city. Class1005class is the experimental class, given by the teaching method of "cooperative learning" including Team-Game-Tournament, Jigsaw, Group Investigation, Role Playing and so on. Class1006is the comparative class, given by the traditional teaching method. The period from September,2012to January,2013is the experimental process. The students have been tested both before and after the test. The corresponding statistics of scores of before and after the test as well as the students’attitudes towards teaching methods have been done. The data from test, questionnaire survey, comparison between experimental class and comparative class has also been analyzed.With the aid of SPSS17.0, the author has made a detailed analysis of the collected data. The experimental result shows that cooperative learning plays an important role in the rural high school English teaching. Cooperative learning can also improve students’scores under the conditions of poor rural classroom and rural high school students’low English level. What’s more, the experiment proves that the more positive students are in cooperative learning, the higher scores students gets in the exam. In addition, cooperative learning can also help to promote the students’self-confidence and develop their English learning skills and habits, improve the peer relationship and students are more active to help each other."Cooperative learning" method is feasible, and also effective in rural high school English classroom teaching. |
