合作学习在初中英语写作教学中的应用
2023-09-01 09:09
论文总字数：34544字
摘 要
传统英语写作教学中，学生缺乏兴趣和信心，而新课标更强调学生写作各阶段能力的提高。如何抓住写作各阶段利用课余时间来提高学生写作训练的效率是英语写作教学很重要的议题。本文通过分析初中生英语写作教学现状提出合作学习可以解决现有问题。经过对一所采用合作学习的初中展开有关英语写作教学的问卷调查、访谈，其实验数据可以验证合作学习在写作教学中是可行和有效的，可以帮助教师改变写作教学方法，帮助学生增加写作信心。
关键词：合作学习；初中英语；英语写作教学；运用
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 1
3. The Present Situation of Cooperative Learning in the Writing English Teaching in Junior Middle School 3
3.1 Cooperative Learning 3
3.2 The writing requirements of the new English curriculum standards 4
3.3 The present situation of English writing in junior high school 5
4. Data Analysis and Discussion 6
4.1 Date collection 6
4.2 Analysis of the results of the two questionnaires and the tests 7
4.3 Analysis of the interview 10
5. Conclusion 11
Works Cited 13
1. Introduction
The term “cooperation” has a long history. When cooperation is mentioned, most people would say win-win cooperation. This concept is more applied to business cooperation between enterprises and culture and economic exchanges between countries. In today’s era, more and more attention has been paid to cooperation, which is not only reflected in the above-mentioned aspects, but also continuously applied to the field of education. China’s New English Curriculum Standards require that the concept of cooperation be brought into the teaching of English writing. Although this is a new attempt for teachers and students, it is not a purposeless exploration. After all, we live in a cooperative world.
In junior high school English teaching, many teachers attach importance to other aspects and neglect writing. Most teachers seldom apply cooperative learning in writing, so students cannot use it flexibly. In other words, teachers apply the concept of cooperative learning more in listening, speaking and reading. In terms of writing, they are more traditional teaching models. Students are accustomed to following the teacher’s classroom rhythm and they don’t spend more time discussing together. At this stage, the feasibility of cooperative learning in junior high school English teaching is seldom mentioned. This article will discuss it in detail and draw conclusions based on an analysis of the current state of English writing.
There are six chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is the introduction. It mainly includes this thesis’s background, significance and the basic framework. Chapter two discusses the early research on English writing and cooperative learning, which includes the research at home and abroad. Chapter three analyzes the present situation of writing teaching, the requirements of the new English curriculum standard for English writing and the concrete implementation of cooperative learning. Chapter four is the analysis of collected data. Chapter five is a conclusion of this research.
2. Literature Review
As a kind of teaching theory and teaching strategy, cooperative learning has strong creative and practical effect, and has the reputation as being “The most important and successful teaching reform in recent decades”.（Bai 1）It first sprung up in 1970s in the United States, having made theoretical breakthrough in the 1980s and had an important position in the mainstream of the teaching theory and teaching strategy of today’s society.
Cooperative Learning appeared in 1700, but it was only in the 1950s that it was formally studied in the United States. The symbol of its rise is the “cooperative pedagogy” theory put forward by the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. After that, western countries have done a lot of research, and many cooperative learning modes have been formed. Among them, the best-known is Robert Slavin’s Student Team Learning model, David Johnson and Roger Johnson’s Learning Together model, Kagon’s Structure Approach, Elizabeth Cohen’s Complex Instruction and J. Britton and D. Barnes’s Collaborative Approach and so on.
Cooperative learning is called “cooperative teaching” in our country, while countries such as the former Soviet Union called it as “cooperative pedagogy”. Although there is no uniform definition of cooperative learning in some countries such as the United States, compared with the traditional teaching methods, it does not affect the essence of cooperative learning in the pursuit of teaching philosophy-relevance. At the same time, these educators summarized a number of cooperative learning methods, such as Team Accelerated Instruction (TAI), or Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC) (Slavin 1985, 1987), Computer Assistant Cooperative Learning (CACL) (Aronson 1986), and Learning Together（Johnson 1986), and so on.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the cooperative teaching in China only began to achieve initial results, and only then did it have the substantive significance of research and practice. In 2001, the State Council’s Decision on the Reform and Development of Basic Education made a specific emphasis on cooperative learning: “encouraging cooperative learning, promoting mutual exchange among students, developing together, and promoting teachers and students’ common progress.”(https://wenku.baidu.com/view/6b351629f242336c1eb95e72.html) Since then, cooperative learning has really played a role and it has affected the reform of education in China. At the end of 1980s, the “cooperative pedagogy” of the former Soviet Union was used for reference and imitated one after another in the mainland at that time. On this basis, some theoretical scholars in Shanghai, Jiangsu and other places put forward the idea of cooperative teaching between teachers and students, and carried out experiments on cooperative education, and achieved some practical results. At present, the research of Chinese scholars on cooperative learning mainly focuses on the following aspects: how to divide cooperative learning groups, how to determine the evaluation mode of cooperative learning.
Foreign writing originated from Rhetoric, and the “writing rhetoric environment” is the traditional mode of writing teaching abroad. William H. Roberts believes that teachers should pay attention to the existence of language in writing, transform rhetoric into writing means, and focus on language problems to promote students’ learning and writing. (Roberts amp; Turgeon 345 ) The genre teaching method appeared in the 1980s, and the process genre appeared in 2000. Both two teaching methods have their own shortcomings. Edward P. Bailey pointed out that students’ personal experiences, familiar people and things can help students to better write English. (Bailey amp; Powe 7) The research on English writing is not comprehensive in China. The perspective of research is single to discuss language output, overall language and student needs.
3. The Present Situation of Cooperative Learning in the Writing English Teaching in Junior Middle School
3.1 Cooperative Learning
3.1.1 The definition of Cooperative Learning
Elizabeth Cohen (1994), broadly defined Cooperative Learning as students working together in a group small enough that everyone can participate in a collective task that has been clearly assigned in her recent review of cooperative learning and the conditions for productive small groups. Moreover, students are expected to carry out their task without the direct supervision of the teacher. (Grisham 4) “Cooperative learning is the use of groups in teaching to enable students to work together to maximize their own and others’ learning.” said by the Johnson D.W.amp; Johnson R.T.( Johnson, Johnson and Holubec 15) One of the famous educational scholars in China believed that cooperative learning is a strategy which improves the cooperation among the students in heterogeneous group in order to achieve the common goals.( Wang 106)
Combing the viewpoints of the above scholars, the Cooperative Learning has the following characters. The students are divided into some groups. They need to help others by making great effort. They have a common goal which is the basis for rewarding. So cooperative learning is not only a strategy but also a new learning style which shows individual cooperation ability and the collective wisdom. The common goal is achieved through teacher-student interaction. The evaluation is from the comprehensive manifestation of the group rather than the individual"s performance.
3.1.2 The new strategies of Cooperative Learning
With the application of cooperative learning, four new strategies related to cooperative learning have been proposed by scholars. These four new cooperative learning strategies have no advantages or disadvantages in themselves. All of these four strategies are learner-centered and are aimed at promoting students to construct meaning, develop communication and cooperative ability in cooperative learning.
The help-acceptance cooperative learning group is generally 2 people. The interaction between the peers is often one-on-one. It is expressed as “I teach, you listen.” Specific methods are presented as “grouping - learning - evaluation”. The collaborative-receptive cooperative learning group is four people. The teaching strategy starts from the whole class, the cooperative learning runs through the teaching process, and finally ends with the teacher’s class summary. It specifically assigns tasks to individuals as a manifestation of their differentiation from the previous strategy. These two teaching strategies which are the help-discovery cooperative learning and the collaborative-discovery cooperative learning are more able to highlight the nature of cooperation, emphasize that students are at the center of learning writing. However, the two must be differentiated and used flexibly. The former is mainly used in class. The latter can be used not only in class, but also in extracurricular research. (Liu amp; Gao 37-47)
3.1.3 The specific application of cooperative learning in ideal state.
Preparation before writing consists of the following four parts. The first aspect is the cooperation to decide the theme of writing. Students can think about it after getting the topic, explaining their own understanding to the team members, and then summarize the final theme after integrating each person’s point of view. The second part is to collect materials. In order to avoid duplication of effort and save time, students must clearly assign collection tasks. After completing the collection tasks, students should concentrate on sharing resources. Next, cooperating and appreciating the excellent composition, so that students can complete the writing task by borrowing the style of excellent composition. Brainstorming is the last part. Everyone can discuss together by presenting their ideas, and then form an outline. In writing, when students meet problems, they can turn to their teachers or classmates for help. The cooperation after writing is mainly reflected in three aspects: cooperative correction, cooperative assessment and cooperative collation. Cooperative correction is that teachers let group members correct each other. Cooperative assessment is that the team members give appropriate comments after the correction. Cooperative collation is to summarize the suggestions made by the team members to remind themselves not to make similar mistakes again.
3.2 The writing requirements of the new English curriculum standards
According to the New English Curriculum Standards (2011), every junior middle school graduate is required to achieve Level 5. The writing requirements of Level 5 are as follows:
Students should be able to:
(1) Gather and organize material according to the purpose of the writing；
(2) Draft short articles and text messages independently, modify them under the guidance of the teacher;
(3) Use common conjunctions to represent the order and the logical relationship；
(4) Write simple descriptions of people or things；
(5) Write simple paragraphs, instructions and explanations according to prompt given in pictures or tables.
It is not difficult to find out that the New English Curriculum emphasizes that writing is a process of cooperative learning, namely: collecting information before writing, communicating and cooperating with group members in writing, revising and reflecting after writing. No matter which stage of writing, a team role which will make writing simpler and more accurate needs to be played. (Ministry of Education 12)
3.3 The present situation of English writing in junior high school
At present, English teachers continue to apply the traditional English writing teaching mode. This kind of teaching mode is relatively simple. Students only need to follow the teacher’s classroom rhythm to complete the whole process of writing without using strategies. Although the teachers take up so much time and effort to correct the composition, the student only regarded writing as a task.
The New English Curriculum Standards require that cooperative learning be incorporated into the English class. Therefore, most teachers began to apply the relevant knowledge of cooperative learning in English teaching, but mainly used in listening and reading. Although a small number of teachers apply cooperative learning in writing teaching, they only apply to the pre-writing preparation stage, rather than allow students to spend time applying cooperative learning during writing and writing.
There is no doubt that cooperative learning has begun to be applied to the teaching of English writing. However, due to the influence of the traditional writing teaching mode, there are still some problems in the application of cooperative learning. For example, students’ writing enthusiasm is not high and students lack confidence in writing. Therefore, they are unwilling to actively communicate with others. Teachers pay insufficient attention to English writing teaching. They have reduced the time of writing teaching, and the writing teaching method falls behind the development needs of students. Teachers did not adopt new cooperative learning strategies in the writing class, which led to insufficient thinking of students’ English writing innovation. However, in English writing, the widespread application of cooperative learning can solve these problems.
4. Data Analysis and Discussion
During the period from October to December of 2018, the author carried out the application research of the Cooperative Learning in English writing teaching in Beiliu junior high school of Beiliu, Guangxi. The object of this study is the class taught by the author, and all data collection is done by the students in this class.
4.1 Date collection
In this chapter, the author will show and analyze the questionnaires, tests and the interview. This chapter is to prove that cooperative learning is effective and feasible in English writing teaching. Three kinds of methods were used in this experiment, questionnaires, tests and interviews.
（1）The Pre-questionnaire and Post-questionnaire
The pre-questionnaire (Appendix A) was applied before the experiment, and all the students were selected to fill in the questionnaire. After analyzing the Han Jinlong (Han 40) and Tian Rong’s questionnaires (Tian 79-80), this comprehensive questionnaire was designed. 63 questionnaires were handed out and 63 copies were collected.
The post-questionnaire（Appendix B）was selected from Qu Hongbo.（Qu 23-25）The problems include students’ feelings about English writing, English writing skills, writing results, interpersonal communication and so on. 63 questionnaires were handed out and 63 copies were collected.
（2）The Tests
In order to compare the changes of the implementation of cooperative learning in junior high school, a pre-test and a post-test (Appendix C) was conducted in this experiment，from which it can be verified that cooperative learning is feasible and effective in junior middle school English writing teaching.
（3）An Interviews
After the experiment, 6 students and 3 teachers were required to join in interview (Appendix D), they were interviewed separately. The interview was aimed at knowing more about the change of students’ writing attitudes and their feeling after teaching in the cooperative learning and the teacher’s attitude towards the Application of Cooperative Learning Strategy in classroom. The 6 questions of the interview were listed in the appendix.
4.2 Analysis of the results of the two questionnaires and the tests
The author has distributed two questionnaires in this class, respectively, at the beginning of the semester and after the implementation of cooperative learning in the teaching of English writing. The purpose of the pre-questionnaire was to understand the students’ interest, confidence and English writing habits, and the post-questionnaire was to know the changes of students after applied cooperative learning.
There are 63 students doing the questionnaire and the 63 questionnaires are effective.
Table 4.2.1 The results of the pre-questionnaire in the class (N=63)
Items | Pre | A% | B% | C% | D% |
1.motivation for writing | interest | communication | exam | no idea | |
Pre-Q | 16 | 12 | 60 | 12 | |
2.interest in writing | great interest | some interest | a little interest | no interest | |
Pre-Q | 15 | 25 | 13 | 47 | |
3.self- assessment: writing ability | good | not bad | poor | don’t know | |
Pre-Q | 10 | 17 | 50 | 23 | |
4.satisfaction of the current writing teaching approach | very satisfied | satisfied | don’t mind | dissatisfied | |
Pre-Q | 12 | 18 | 48 | 22 | |
5.which is the first concern step in writing | requirement of genre and content | a word for word translation | write down the recited sentence | no plan | |
Pre-Q | 8 | 23 | 25 | 44 | |
6.the most difficult part | no useful knowledge in mind | the use of word, 剩余内容已隐藏，请支付后下载全文，论文总字数：34544字
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