A Case Study On The Effectiveness Of Cooperative Learning Of English Classes In Junior Middle School

Nowadays more and more junior middle schools begin to apply cooperative learning method to English classes.The experience,philosophy and organizing ability of teachers are the basic requirements for the application of cooperative learning in English classes.Since the transformative practice of cooperative learning method carried out in China,the differences of classes between novice teachers and proficient teachers have aroused the concern of practical and theoretical research.Thus,this paper aims to make a comparison of novice teacher’s and proficient teacher’s English classes,analyze the factors which affecting the effectiveness of English classes between these two kinds of teachers and find out ways for novice teachers to improve the effectiveness of cooperative learning of English classes.This research lasted for about two months and it took two parallel Grade Seven classes together with their two teachers from one junior middle school in Hangzhou as research participants.According to Berliner’s definition of novice teacher and proficient teacher,the author chose one novice teacher who just graduated from normal university and one proficient teacher who experienced cooperative learning for six years.This study took classroom observation,interview,questionnaire as the research instruments.This paper firstly made a comparison of students from novice teacher’s and proficient teacher’s English classes in three aspects.Initially,from the perspective of classroom performance,students from novice teacher’s class were always heated even noisy while students from proficient teacher’s class were harmonious.Then,from the perspective of learning results,the English learning abilities and academic performance of both two classes were improved.Students from proficient teacher’s class made more significant progress than those from novice teacher’s class.Finally,in terms of extracurricular learning,some students of both two classes would learn English and solve English problems with others.However most students from novice teacher’s class were inclined to ask teacher for help because their teams sometimes couldn’t solve problems in class until the teacher helped them.Students from proficient teacher’s class were willing to solve English problems in teams because they enjoy the process of working together.So the English classes of proficient teacher were more effective than those of novice teacher.Then this study analyzed these two teachers from the perspectives of teaching philosophy,teaching management and teaching skill.The proficient teacher took students as the center of teaching while novice teacher gradually showed her transition from teacher-centered concept to student-centered concept.The proficient teacher balanced cooperation,competition and individual learning parts well and she made English cooperative tasks suitable for students’ learning skills.She also gave students pressure before completing the task and chose peer evaluation with encourage as the priority.The novice teacher lacked experience of flexible management in class and she didn’t manage class according to the characteristics of physical and psychological development of students.She didn’t pay attention to the importance of universality and individuality,comprehensible input and peer evaluation to the development of students.In order to improve the effectiveness of cooperative learning in English class,teachers in junior middle school should set up educational concept of being"students-centered",accumulate abundant teaching experience and improve teaching skills.At last,the findings provide some pedagogical implications about cooperative learning of English class for teachers,especially novice teachers.The research also pointed out some limitations and some suggestions to be studied in the future.