A Survey On The Current Situation Of Cooperative Learning In Rural Senior High School English Classrooms

Cooperative learning,an accepted instructional strategy at all levels of education,fits well for the requirement of highly-advanced society,the characteristics of English as a subject,the education development and proves to be a mainstream in the area of education.Extensive experiments carried out have confirmed that it is beneficial to both teachers and students,especially to students in academic achievement,positive interpersonal relationships and psychological health.Due to its noticeable benefits,lots of schools have been putting cooperative learning into practice and positive effects have been achieved.However,because of its being a new strategy,there exist many challenges and difficulties.The focus of this study is to explore the current situation of cooperative learning in rural senior high school English classrooms and to find out the possible problems that affect the efficiency of cooperative learning.Questionnaires and interviews are all adopted to collect data.For convenience,the middle school where the author is working is chosen.A total of 134 Senior Two students,64 girls and 70 boys who are involved in cooperative learning,participate in questionnaires.In addition,six English teachers in Senior Two who are applying cooperative learning to varying degrees and six students who participate in the questionnaires are engaged in interviews.All data collected,the author starts to analyze it.Findings demonstrated that both teachers and students,though,are willing to embrace cooperative learning,the implementation of it is not efficient and there are some existing problems in its practice: lacking appropriate cooperative learning tasks,lacking essential cooperative skills,lacking effective assessment,unreasonable group formation,improper teachers' roles and chaotic classroom.Based on the findings from the investigation,possible recommendations regarding better application of cooperative learning in rural senior high school English classrooms are provided.On the one hand,it is necessary and critical for teachers to appropriately take on their roles,to appropriately group students,to appropriately design cooperative tasks and appropriately assess students' cooperative learning performance.On the other hand,students,as the center of learning,they had better increase their awareness of cooperation and improve skills concerning cooperative learning,such as skills of expression,listening and resolving conflicts.Besides,the administrators need to develop a whole vision and provides professional training and various chances for teachers to learn and practice.