An Empirical Study On Cooperative Learning In English Writing In Rural Senior High School

What is known to all is that writing is one of the most important components in the four fundamental skills in English learning. But in the daily teaching in English writing class, writing is not paid enough attention to. Both teachers and students find it very tiring and tough to improve the performance of writing, so they lose heart. In that case, the English writings of most of the students in the Colleague Entrance Exam are far from satisfactory, which upsets educators and their parents. So for the time being, teachers and students are in urgent need of a new approach to change the present situation. Cooperative learning satisfies their needs.. Cooperative learning, dating back to the 1970’s in the United States, won great recognition by most of the educators, proving to be useful and efficient. So the experiment in this thesis will prove whether it is suitable for rural senior high school whose students are poor in English learning, especially in English writing.As a breakthrough of the traditional teaching method, cooperative learning has been widely used in primary and senior classes. However, from the present situation, there exist some problems, such as cooperative learning only in the from, unfair opportunities for different students, improper positions for teachers.The thesis will analyze the cooperative learning thoroughly, by studying the practical effect of the approach, I hope to establish an effective class where students can improve and gain knowledge with whoever is interested in cooperative learning.The experiment was carried out in an ordinary school, Meichang Senior High school in Wuqing district in Tianjin. The author chose Class 7 and Class 8 in grade three as subjects. The author chose Class 8 to be experimental class, on the contrary, Class 7 was regarded as control class. The process of the experiment included pre-test, experiment, post-test. Writing class was carried out once a week in the two classes, the experimental class adopted cooperative learning method, with traditional teaching method in control class. One semester later, questionnaires and interviews were used to reveal whether cooperative learning can reduce students’ level of anxiety; improve students’ interest; in what aspects can students writing ability be improved.The results were listed as follows. Cooperative learning would reduce the students’ anxiety in English writing class and arouse students’ interest in English writing. In addition, compared with the traditional writing style, cooperative learning would improve students’ writing ability greatly in many aspects, including compositions’ overall structure, expressions, punctuation, superior words and sentence patterns.Based on the research above, the thesis put forward the following suggestions: cooperative learning can be applied to the daily English class. This is a method which is suitable for students’ psychology and learning model. If used properly, the cooperative learning method will surely benefit students a lot in learning ability, character training, interpersonal relationship.