An Empirical Study On Cooperative Learning In Year-seven’ English Speaking Classroom

The acquisition of a language requires not only mastering the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar but also knowing the way to use it. However, Chinese learners of English have not paid attention to the English speaking learning. Students learn English only by focusing on vocabulary and grammar. Modern society requires people to have a strong sense of cooperation and communication besides the basic knowledge of English in and out of English classroom. The National English Curriculum Standards clearly points out that the focus of the reform is to change the traditional tendency to over-emphasize vocabulary and grammar learning. Meanwhile, it stresses that teachers should take students’ life experience, learning interest, affective needs and cognitive style into consideration in the classroom. Besides, students are encouraged to learn by themselves or learn through cooperation. They are expected to participate actively in the activities in order to develop their language skills as well as to improve their communicative skills.In the study, the researcher makes an empirical study on the cooperative learning in the Year Seven’ English speaking classroom. The researcher begins to conduct an experiment based on some importantly related theories, including cooperative learning theory, social interdependence theory, classroom instruction technology, motivational theory, second language acquisition theory and cooperation-based English speaking learning theory.This study aims to find out the effectiveness of cooperative learning and make an analysis of the factors and the methods that can improve students’ English speaking ability. Based on the aim, the researcher intends to answer the following two questions:(1) What factors will affect the English speaking ability in the cooperative classroom?(2) How can cooperative learning improve speaking ability?In order to answer the two questions, the researcher adopted four kinds of data collection instrument:questionnaire, interviews, observation and tests. The participants are the students who come from the two classes in Xi’an Tie Yi Bin He campus. According to the comparison of the control class and the experiment class, the researcher concludes the final results.The results show that after a semester’experiment, students in the experiment class make much more progress than those who are in the control class in English speaking ability. The researcher analyzed the results from two aspects:the factors that influenced the English speaking ability and the teaching methods the teacher used during the whole teaching process.In conclusion, the cooperative learning is useful in developing students’ English speaking ability, therefore, teachers should make use of it and make endeavors to overcome the possible difficulties on the way.