1.1 Background of the study
English, as a universal language, is a kind of communicative language. With the rapiddevelopment of our country, it is obviously that oral English is becoming more and more important.Especially, college students are aware of the importance of oral English. Thus, it is crucial for studentsto care about how to communicate with foreigners in English in daily life and at work. However,having spent in learning English for a long time, a large number of students still can hardly speak out acomplete sentence although they have a barge of vocabulary and a great deal of grammatical rules in theirminds, let alone communicate fluently and accurately in English. This is described as “the dumbEnglish” and “the deaf English”. The cause of the problem is that our English teaching classrooms arecontrolled by the traditional teacher-centered grammar-translation method. Traditional methodsoveremphasize the vocabulary and grammatical rules, neglecting the communicative competence andthe students’ autonomous study and the connotation of the human course. In traditional classroom,teachers dominate the whole class and are regarded as the unique authority. Teachers explain andtranslate the text in a traditional way, while paying little attention to the feelings and reflections of thestudents. The only thing students can do is to take notes of what the teachers say mechanically. Theyhave little opportunities to participate in real communication in class. They spend a large portion oftheir time memorizing the words and grammatical patterns individually. Meanwhile, many studentsdon’t have enough time and opportunities to practice English in class and lack the real communicativeatmosphere in their learning process, so they are afraid of loosing faces and hesitate to express theiropinion voluntarily. Therefore, more interaction using the target language between peers should beencouraged in our classrooms. In order to solve this problem, the teachers have the responsibility to finda new teaching method to arouse students’ enthusiasm to speak out. So this study is intended topropose cooperative learning to the oral English teaching. Through abundant research and experiment,cooperative learning approach is proposed to solve these problems.Cooperative learning emphasizes that the students are regarded as the main body of the classroom.Just as John Dewey once stated, “Education should focus on students, and schools should work forstudents’ need”. All the students are encouraged to participate in the classroom activities and communicate with other peers in the group. It gives students more opportunities to interact to learnfrom each other and requires students to share information, help and cooperate with each other for thecommon goals. So, teachers have responsibilities to prepare as much as possible for the students to beable to speak English in the real world outside the classroom and the workshop.
1.2 Purpose of the study
Many researches have proved that cooperative learning is regarded as a creative and effectiveteaching approach and can improve the class atmosphere, student achievements, stimulate the goodquality and spirits of the students. So the study is to investigate: ⑴to examine how the teacherdesigns and organizes oral English teaching employed Cooperative Learning approach in class, ⑵toexplore and record the students’ performance a，英语论文题目，英语论文题目 |
