On The Application Of Cooperative Learning In Junior High School English Classrooms

Cooperative learning is one of the most widely used organizational forms of classroom instruction globally as well as an important approach to promoting the general development of students’ intellectual and non-intellectual abilities and cultivating teamwork and collaboration competency among students. By analyzing the problems of cooperative learning practice in English teaching and forming a new practice approach – the classroom centered optimizing cyclic system, this research attempts to improve the effectiveness of cooperative learning.The paper starts with the concept and basic theory relating to cooperative learning, followed by analyzing the features of middle school English teaching and the status of cooperative learning practices, and finally attempts to improve the effectiveness of cooperative learning among middle school English study groups by creating a classroom centered optimizing cyclic system. The system is a dynamic interacting cyclic mechanism composed of 4 process elements of pre-lecture, lecture, post-lecture and optimization as well as 3 participant elements of teachers, students and textbooks. Classroom teaching is the execution step of the whole cyclic system. Adequate pre-lecture preparation is a necessary prerequisite for effective classroom teaching. Post-lecture feedbacks from students and teachers are the main references for optimizing the next teaching cycle. Analysis and processing is the direct embodiment of optimization and improvement. Cycles following each other enable continuous optimization and improvement. During execution, all elements should be handled simultaneously and supplementarily to avoid deteriorating the overall effect of the whole system due to lag of individual elements.Teaching experiments are conducted in 2 classes instructed by the author. By comparing and analyzing the data collected from questionnaires, performance tests and interviews, it is concluded that the classroom centered optimizing cyclic system can activate students’ interests in learning, enhance teamwork performance, and improve learning mechanisms,and further promote academic achievement to a certain extent. The teaching experiments are useful references that provide operational case studies for improving the effectiveness of middle school English cooperative learning.