Application Of Cooperative Learning To The Teaching Of English Writing In A Vocational School

For the near two decades,cooperative learning has been adopting in English teaching and proved to be a good method by many scholars.Most studies,however,are conducted in junior and senior schools,colleges and universities.Moreover,it is mostly adopted in English listening,speaking and reading classes,while the studies on English writing is fewer.This empirical study investigated the effect of cooperative learning(CL)on English writing classes in a vocational school.It aims at exploring an effective teaching method to reduce vocational school students’ writing anxiety and to improve their writing ability from four aspects:language,content,organization and mechanics.The researcher conducted an experiment which lasts for 4 months.112 students majoring in primary teaching in a local vocational school participated in this study.All of them were divided into two groups:experimental group and controlled group.In the writing process,experimental group accepted the cooperative learning method,while the controlled group still adopted the product-focused method.The two groups had the same teacher,used the same textbook and materials as well as completed the same writing tasks.The quantitative research and qualitative research design were used in this research.The instruments used are pre-questionnaires,post-questionnaires,interview,pre-test and post-test.After the research,all the data were collected by EXCEL 2007 and analyzed by SPSS 24.0.The results showed a statistically significant difference in favor of the experimental group after cooperative treatment.It showed that cooperative learning had a positive effect on students’ writing.Firstly,cooperative learning method can reduce students’ anxiety in English writing,especially in the anxiety of avoidance,evaluation and somatic.In addition,it can help students improve their writing scores and writing ability from its language,content,organization and mechanics.Specifically,the effect was significant for its organization and content.