Application Of Cooperative Learning To The English Writing Teaching For Art Students In Senior Middle Schools

Writing is one of the four basic skills of English and it reflects the comprehensive English ability of students.If students want to learn English well,they must have good writing ability.Writing plays an important role in English learning as well as in National College Entrance Examination.However,we spent very limited time in teaching writing in class,and the teaching methods are quite traditional and boring,students feel it difficult to get improvement in it,and writing becomes a burden for learning English,and even worse,students may lose interest in learning English.It is imperative for teachers to find an effective teaching approach for writing.Art students is a special group in senior middle schools.Compared with other students,they have more distinct personalities.The National College Entrance Examination requires certain marks to them as well,but a lot of school activities and art training occupy too much time,which makes them hardly focus on the general courses,their academic performance levels need to be improved greatly.Furthermore,the art students are commonly weak in English,they often show their unwillingness of learning English,some of them even give up English tests.Teachers are puzzled about how to stimulate students' writing interest according to their learning conditions.In the 1970's,an educational theory called Cooperative Learning initiated in the USA.The effectiveness and efficiency of this theory is approved by many professional scholars and experts.This thesis tries to explore how Cooperative Learning improves the writing proficiency and writing interests of art students in senior middle schools.This thesis is divided into six parts.The first part is the brief introduction to the present thesis,including the background of the research,the purpose of the research,the significance of the research and the framework of the thesis.Then,the second part is the literature review.To retrospect some relative researches about Cooperative Learning and English writing.The third part is the theoretical foundation,including the cognitive development theory,the constructivism theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory.The fourth part is the main body of the paper.Firstly,two research questions have been put forward:1)Compared with traditional product approach in English writing teaching,can cooperative learning improve the writing proficiency of art students in senior middle schools?2)Can cooperative learning help the art students change their attitude towards English writing from being passive to being active?The participants of this cooperative writing experiment are 64 students in Art Class 1 and Art Class 2,Grade 2 of Weiyuan Vocational School,Gansu province.The students of Art Class 1 have been treated as experimental class and applied the cooperative learning in English writing,while the ones in Art Class 2 are treated as control class and accept the traditional teaching method.In terms of research instruments,the author mainly used questionnaire,test and interview.In the fifth chapter,the author gets the data of the experiment and analyses these data.The last part is conclusion:The cooperative learning applied in art students' English writing can improve students' writing proficiency and interest.The author hopes the results of the study can be widely applied in teaching writing in senior middle schools.As for the existing problems,more explorations and improvements are required in further studies.