A Study Of Cooperative Learning In Vocabulary Learning Of Senior School Students Weak In English

Vocabulary learning plays a vital role in language learning. It is involved in the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. English Vocabulary teaching has been paid more and more attention to in senior school in recent years. How to make students grasp a certain amount of vocabulary is a tough problem for most senior school teachers. But most traditional ways neglect the initiative participation and interaction between students; as a result it is unable to meet the needs of modern teaching. Many researchers and educators at abroad have pointed out that cooperative learning could be an effective and creative way for English learning. At home, there are more and more researches have paid attention to cooperative learning and have got some empirical research achievements. But most experiments are carried out in Junior or Senior high schools in the developed areas. Guided by the National English Curriculum Standards for Senior high school in China, the author carried out this experiment in an ordinary Senior high school in Guizhou Province. In this school, half of the students are from countryside around Duyun city. Their parents flood into big cities for living and their homes are far from school, so they have to board in school. Some of them live with migrant worker parents. Their English was very weak when they came into senior school. This research is intended to explore a method of vocabulary learning for students who are weak in the foundation of English in senior high school.In this paper, the author carries out an experiment in order to confirm the effects of cooperative learning and find out the answers to the following research questions:(1)Can cooperative learning mode improve the weak students’ vocabulary learning enthusiasm?(2) Is cooperative learning better than the traditional teaching model to help the weak students to grasp the form, pronunciation and meaning of the vocabulary?(3) Will the weak students’ attitude to learn English be changed in cooperative learning?Meanwhile, Questionnaire I was done in both the control class and the experimental class before the experiment. The results showed that there was a significant change in the method of vocabulary learning in the experimental class while there was nearly no difference in the control class.In addition, the attitude to vocabulary learning in experimental class was investigated by using the Questionnaire II. The results showed that the students had a positive change in English learning attitude. This experimental study shows that cooperative learning has a positive effect on English vocabulary learning in the weak students, as well as their attitudes.