An Application Of Cooperative Learning To College English Teaching In Military Academies

With the rapid growth and development of international communication and cooperation, foreign language learning, especially English learning has long been put on the spotlight of higher education, where top talents and high-end professionals learn and conduct research to better improve English teaching both academically and pedagogically, and military academies are with no exception.As the cradle and base for cultivating high-quality and well-educated military personnel for the future of PLA and CAPF, military academies shoulder great responsibility in national defense and military modernization. On the one hand, because of the special education system, cadets are fully occupied with normal classes, military trainings, temporary duty and service, and they have little autonomous time in study. As a result, most of them are not well-motivated in learning, especially in English study, which requires a lot of time for practice and communication. They always act poorly in class with so many of them sleeping, being absent-minded, giving no feedback and they devote little time to doing any reading, listening or practice out of class. The only motivation for their English learning is to pass examinations and obtain diploma. Military academies, on the other hand, are places where collectivism is highly valued, and cadets usually have classes, perform duties and conduct trainings with their company’s and Party’s benefits or interests in their minds, which serves as the perfect test field for the application of cooperative learning in English class, because group or cooperation is something deeply rooted in their minds and daily life and "Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning (Johnson, Johnson & Holubec,1993:6).Based on the particularity of military academies and cadets, to tackle the problems facing cadets’ English learning, collect effective data and ensure both reliability and validity of the result, this research combines quantitative and qualitative research together to conduct an experiment of 5 months with instruments like questionnaires, language proficiency tests, interviews and observations both in and out of class. The results show that cooperative learning approaches are more effective than the traditional whole class teaching method and cadets are improved in their academic achievement, practical skills in listening and speaking and social interaction skills in group learning. Besides the fruitful benefits, the researcher also discovers some problems during the process of cooperative learning, and proposes some possible strategies to tackle the problems.