An Empirical Study On Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures In Primary School English Teaching

With the continuous implementation of compulsory education and the deepening of the new curriculum reform,to cultivate students’ cooperative spirit and cooperation ability has become one of the important tasks.Cooperative learning has aroused more and more attention from teachers and it has been applied more and more widely.Some scholars state that the mode of cooperative learning can be divided into two schools:“Lesson-based approach” and “Structural approach”.Spencer Kagan is the typical representative of “Structural approach”.The core concept of Kagan Cooperative Learning is structure,that is,“Content + structure =activity”.Different contents match different structures and this creates different activities and this can promote the interaction between teachers and students,students and students and the interaction between students and the texts.So far,Spencer Kagan and his colleagues have developed more than 200 kinds of cooperation structures,and established the Kagan Cooperative Learning institute,which is mainly engaged in researching the theories of cooperative learning and training teachers.However,in China,most researches on cooperative learning are based on “Lesson-based approach”.The majority of the researches are on the basis of Robert Slavin’s or Johnson brothers’ cooperative learning method,and these researches mostly focus on the adoption of cooperative learning in middle or senior high school.As for primary school English teaching,there is not much empirical research on the primary school English cooperative learning.Therefore,from the empirical perspective,to explore the application of Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures in primary school is of some practical significance to some extent.In order toexplore the effectiveness of Kagan cooperative learning structures and its influence on students’ English learning,this thesis applies Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures to primary school English teaching which combines the theory analysis with teaching experiment.It is hoped this research can provide some references for primary school English teaching.The thesis chooses two classes of Grade Five in Chengdu Tianfu New Area Hejiang Primary School as the research subjects.The teaching experiment lasted for 18 weeks and the research questions are as follows:1.Can Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures improve pupils’ interests of learning English and enlarge pupils’ participation in English class?2.Can Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures improve pupils’ academic achievement in English learning?3.Can Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures deduce pupils’ disruptive behaviors and improve their social skills?Through the tests,questionnaires,interview and classroom observation,the data was collected and the SPSS 23.0 and Excel software were used to analyze the data.After data analysis,here comes to the following conclusions:1.Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures inspire pupils’ interest of learning English and improve their participation in English class.2.Secondly,after adopting Kagan Cooperative Leaning Structures,the pupils’ academic achievement of the experimental class increased slightly.3.Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures can deduce pupils’ disruptive behaviors and improve their social skills.