Application Of Cooperative Learning To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing is one of the four important skills in middle English learning.It takes up more than one sixth of the total score of College Entrance Exam Paper.So,how to improve students’ writing ability is an argent task for middle school English teachers.However,teachers are still applying the traditional teaching style.It plays too much emphasis on the final product and ignores the writing process.Students have little interaction with each other during the writing.Therefore,the writing ability is not as good as it was expected and students gradually lose interest and motivation in English writing.Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences.Cooperative Learning means more than merely arranging students into groups,instead it has been described as "structuring positive interdependence".At present,the researches on cooperative learning mainly focus on theories and English teaching in colleges.The researches on the use of senior high school English writing are few.Therefore,the author tries to do research on applying cooperative learning to English writing in Senior High School.In order to prove that cooperative learning can improve students’ English writing ability in high schools,the author wants to do an experiment in Qinan NO.1 Middle School in which she teaches.The main research questions in this study are as follows 1.Can cooperative learning improve the students’writing achievement?2.What is the experimental class students’ attitude toward using cooperative learning in writing in high school?Thus,an experiment is done by the author.The research subjects in the experiment are 108 students of Grade one in Qinan NO.1 Middle School.Class One of Grade one is the experimental class applying cooperative learning approach and Class Two is the control class of Grade one using the traditional approach to do a comparative experiment.There are 54 students in class 1 as an experimental class and 54 students in class 2 as a control class.The thesis uses pre-test,post-test,pre-questionnaire,post-questionnaire in a term to see whether cooperative learning approach is effective or not by analysis.Besides,the author had a statistic analysis for the students’ composition scores in the pre-test and post-test and analyzed the questionnaire given out in the pre-test and post-test.Finally,the author gets the conclusions:1.Cooperative learning can help improve students’ writing achievement.2.Cooperative learning can make the students of experimental class have a positive attitude in English writing.Therefore,cooperative learning is an effective teaching approach in senior high school English writing.Also,it has some implications for teachers:1.Teachers should change their teaching method on English writing and know something about cooperative learning to arose students interest in writing.2.Teachers should form the habit to make students work together to communicate and apply English into practice so that the students can improve their English achievement.However,because of the limited time and condition,the study still need some suggestions to make it better.