Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes

Han Min

School of Foreign Languages, China West Normal University, Nanchong, 637002, Sichuan, China

Keywords: Active Learning, Cooperative Learning, Effects, Group Activity.

Abstract: Cooperative learning is a relatively new teaching approach which takes group work as a main form. Based

on the theory of cooperative learning and by utilizing as an example a text from New College English

(Second Edition) published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, this research aims to explore

the effects of the application of cooperative learning to reading classes in college English teaching. Results

show that application of cooperative learning is effective in college reading classes.

1 INTRODUCTION

Reading, as one of the four major language skills,

has been playing a vital role in English learning. To

read and understand better, students need to have an

all-round command of English language. For quite a

long time, in English teaching context in China,

teachers make all efforts on improving students’

reading abilities often to find out an unsatisfactory

result. For English reading teaching, cooperative

learning is extensively used to stimulate students to

learn more actively. Many researchers have proved

that it is a creative and effective teaching approach.

It is widely acknowledged that cooperative learning

creates a more interesting and relaxed learning

climate in the classroom. Cooperative learning can

reduce anxiety; promote interaction, increasee

motivation and self-confidence and providee

comprehensible input and output, etc. This paper

aims to study on the effects of cooperative learning

in college reading classes.

2 THE APPLICATION OF

COOPERATIVE LEARNING TO

READING CLASSES

2.1 Participants and Instruments

Participants in this experiment were 85 freshmen

from two classes majoring in Biology in the author’s

university, serving as the experiment group (EG

with 42 students) and the control group (CG with 43

students) respectively. They shared the same

traditional learning experiences and used the same

textbook. Cooperative learning for reading classes

was conducted in the experiment class for four

months while the control class was still exposed to

traditional teaching. Such instruments as

questionnaire (see Appendix), pretest, posttest and

interviews were implemented. SPSS software was

adopted to analyze the test scores.

2.2 Preparations for Teachers and

Students before Reading Classes

Before conducting this experiment, students need to

learn some basic cooperative skills and definitions.

Paul J. Vermette (1998, pp. 5-6) defines cooperative

learning in this way: “Cooperative learning is not

just a strategy, part of a bag of tricks. It is also a

philosophy, one in which the teachers see the class

as a learning community that serves itself as it helps

each and every member. A cooperative classroom

team is relatively permanent, heterogeneously

mixed, small group of students who have been

assembled to complete an activity, produce a series

projects or products and who have been asked to

individually master a body of knowledge.”

According to Sharan (1999), five basic elements are

essential for cooperative learning to produce the

effective cooperative actions and work more

efficiently. The five basic elements are: positive

interdependence, individual accountability,

interpersonal and small group skills, promotive

interaction and group processing. Dividing students

into small groups is very crucial for effective

teaching since students work together from one class

period to many weeks. According to their scores in

228

Min H.

Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes.

DOI: 10.5220/0006022902280232

In Proceedings of the Information Science and Management Engineering III (ISME 2015), pages 228-232

ISBN: 978-989-758-163-2

the pretest, students were divided into different

levels. Each group had one high-level, two

intermediate-level and one low-level student to

ensure the mixture of it. Group members chose one

leader they trust most. As a leader, he/she had a

responsibility of helping the group members

participate in and fulfill their learning activities.

2.3 Teaching Procedures

The most popular researched and used cooperative

learning methods are Jigsaw, Student Team

Achievement Divisions (STAD), Cooperative

Integrated Reading and Composition, Group

Investigation and Learning Together.

In reading classes, the author employed Jigsaw II.

The typical learning procedures in Jigsaw II are

often as follows: students first work in

heterogeneous teams; they are assigned to experts

topics; they read the whole learning materials with

emphasis on their expert topic; they meet in expert

groups to discuss and master their topics; the experts

return to their teams and take turns teaching their

teammates about their topic; finally, they receive

individual and team recognition. Here is a detailed

example about how the author adopted cooperative

learning in her teaching practice. This is a text in

New College English (Second Edition) published by

Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Book 2 Unit 1 Learning, Chinese-style

A. Pre-reading Activities

For the pre-reading tasks, students were assigned to

find out some background information about

“westerners’ education on children” and “some

major differences about education on children

between China and the west”. Also, some keywords

were divided into 4 groups and each member studied

one group of them. They needed to teach others

about these new word and expressions next class.

For other unfamiliar words, they should try to guess

the meaning in the context rather than consulting a

dictionary.

B. While-reading Activities

First, some students were asked to introduce the

background information, next all the members in

turns taught others the assigned new words. Then,

each group member was responsible for analyzing

one different part. Everyone had to study the

assigned materials carefully. Then, they went to the

“expert group” in which all the experts had the same

paragraphs. After discussing with “experts” and

understanding fully about the materials, students

came back to their own group and interpreted their

materials in turns according to the organization of

the passage. After the discussion, some students

were randomly asked to answer these questions:

What’s the author’s feeling when seeing the typical

Chinese learning style (teaching by hold the hands)?

How did your parents teach you to learn things when

you were young?

C. Post-reading Activities

For post-reading activities, students first needed to

analyze the text organization. They needed to divide

the whole text into several parts and summarize the

main idea for each part. Then they had to write down

a short passage to answer the following questions:

What enlightenment have you got from this text?

How would you teach your students after

graduation? These passages would, also, be

corrected by group members first, and then they

handed in another revised one to the teacher.

Evaluations from one and from others are important

for students. The following table was handed out to

students after each reading class to help them reflect

on their in-class behaviors.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 A Survey on Students’ Attitudes

towards Reading and English

Learning

Before this study, a survey was carried out among

100 non-English majors chosen randomly from two

universities. Ninety-six completed copies from 100

distributed questionnaires were obtained, with a

response rate of 96%. As for the questionnaire, there

were 10 statements about English learning and

reading. This section of the questionnaire was

designed to measure students’ attitudes by offering

scales for positive attitudes (strongly agree, agree,

neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree).

Table 1 shows that 28 of the students are not

enthusiastic about reading classes. Reading is crucial

for improving language proficiency while 30

students do not regard reading as an interesting

experience. About 54 students consider reading to be

the most difficult part for them; however 44 students

spend little time reading various books. Only 29

students often pay special attention to the beginning

as well as the end of the reading materials where

some key information may be presented. Most

students have not formed a good habit of noting

down the beautiful words and sentences they read in

Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes

229

Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes

229

books. Most students consider reading

comprehension to be very difficult due to the

unfamiliar words. Hence, whenever meeting the new

words, many students will reach for a dictionary, ask

for their classmates or even skip it instead of trying

to guess its meaning in the context. About 35

students will regularly think about the internal or

external factors that hinder their comprehension in

order to find out better ways to promote their

reading skills.

From this survey, it is clear to see that students still

need to make great efforts on many aspects such as

forming appropriate reading habits, reflecting more

about themselves, thinking more actively while

reading books and most important of all, spending

more time reading various beneficial books to enrich

their culture background.

3.2 Data Analysis on Test Scores

A pretest and a posttest were hold at the beginning

as well as at the end of this research. To guarantee

the validity of the data, all the test papers which

included four reading passages were chosen from

reading comprehension part in CET-4(College

English Test Band 4) papers. CET-4 is a nationwide

test held by the National Ministry of Education for

all the Non-English majors to test their language

proficiency at the end of each semester. Five

questions with four different answers (only one was

the best answer) were followed each passage.

Altogether, there were 20 questions (one point for

each question), so the total score was 20. The author

graded all the test papers. The results of the tests

were analyzed by SPSS.

Table 4 shows the mean score of experiment group

is much higher than that of the control group. The

significance level is 0.000, which means that p<0.01,

therefore, the difference can be very significant. This

table shows students in experiment group have

obtained great achievements.

The mean score for the experiment group in the

post-test is improved about 3 points compared with

that of the pre-test. The significant level is 0.000,

which is p<0.01, hence, it shows that students in the

experiment group have made great progress in

reading in this research.

All these tables indicate that reading ability in

experiment class has been improved a lot under the

instruction of cooperative learning after four months.

It is a desirable outcome for both the teacher and

students. Definitely, this satisfactory result will

bring more confidence to students in their future

learning.

3.3 Interviews from Students

At the end of this experiment, students in experiment

class were interviewed with three open-ended

questions:1) What is your viewpoint on cooperative

learning, effective or ineffective? List out your

reasons. 2) List the advantages and disadvantages of

cooperative learning; 3) What suggestions would

you like to give for future cooperative learning?

Though a few students do not like cooperative

learning, most students think it is effective and

meaningful for their learning. The exchanges of ideas

and cooperation with others can broaden their horizon

and enrich their thoughts. Meaningful interaction in

target language can enhance their language acquisition.

Although a few students who prefer to be independent

learners may feel awkward and boring when

interacting with others, cooperative learning is

welcomed by most students. After all, it is rare to find

out a teaching method that can satisfy the needs of all

the students and all the classroom settings. Cooperative

learning can help learners become active and

autonomous learners rather than being constantly

taught what to do and how to do by the teacher.

4 CONCLUSIONS

All the results from classroom observation,

questionnaire, test scores and interviews show that

cooperative learning is effective in this research.

Cooperative learning can reduce students’ anxiety and

enhance their active involvement in learning. Most

important of all, it can help student build self-

confidence. There is a famous saying: “Tell me and I

will forget. Show me and I may not remember. Let me

try and I will understand.” It just shows the importance

of “try” and “involvement” in the process of learning.

More “try” will definitely help students learn better.

Cooperative learning just provides more chances for

students to “try” and to “involve” in the classroom

activities. To conclude, cooperative learning model

demonstrates a clear picture of the “student-centered”

principle in college English reading classes.

Cooperative learning is worthy of further exploration

and being adopted to many other teaching fields.

REFERENCES

Cohen, E.G. (1997). Designing Groupwork in the

Classroom: Strategies for Heterogeneous Classrooms.

New York: Teachers College Press.

ISME 2015 - Information Science and Management Engineering III

230

ISME 2015 - International Conference on Information System and Management Engineering

230

Harmer, J. (2000). How to teach English. Beijing: Foreign

Language Teaching and Research Press.

Henley, J.( 2002). Cooperative Learning: It’s In There!

Authentic Learning Web from Missouri-Columbia

University.

Slavin, R. E. (1996). Research on Cooperative Learning

and Achievement: What We Know, What We Need to

Know. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 21/1:

43-65.

Vermette, P. J. 1998. Making cooperative learning work:

Student teams in K-12 classrooms. Merrill, an Imprint

of Prentice Hall.

Wang, T. (2001). Cooperative Learning: Principles and

Strategies. Beijing: Xue Yuan Publishing House.

APPENDIX

Questionnaire

1. Reading classes are generally very interesting to

me.

2. Reading various books either in English or in

Chinese is very interesting to me.

3. Reading is the most difficult part for me,

especially in the CET-4.

4. I always set aside some fixed time (e.g. everyday

or every week) to read various books after class.

5. The average time I spend on reading every week

is usually more than 2 hours.

6. I often pay special attention to the beginning as

well as the ending of the reading materials.

I always note down the beautiful words or sentences

that come to me in reading materials.

Reading is difficult for me mainly because of the

new words and I will become anxious on seeing

some new words in reading comprehension.

I often try to guess the meaning of new words from

the context in reading comprehension.

10. I often reflect on the internal or external factors

that hinder my understanding in reading.

Table 1: Results of the questionnaire.

Total Number(96) Strongly agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree

1 27 22 19 17 11

2 28 22 16 15 15

3 33 21 10 14 18

4 30 17 5 18 26

5 31 14 4 24 23

6 16 13 6 31 30

7 11 16 7 33 29

8 24 15 8 23 26

9 37 22 8 16 13

10 18 17 6 29 26

Table 2: Results of Independent Sample T test for Pretest of CG and EG.

Pretest

N Mean SD Variance df Sig.(2-taied) t

Mean

Difference

Std. Error

Difference

CG 43 8.56 3.104 9.633

.955

-.057

-.037

.653

EG 42 8.60 2.914 8.491

Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes

231

Cooperative Learning Applied in College English Reading Classes

231

Table 3: Results of Paired Sample T test for Pretest and Posttest of CG.

N Mean SD Std. Error Mean t df Sig. (2-taied)

Pretest

8.56 3.104

.436

-.053

.958

Posttest 8.53 2.702

Table 4: Results of Independent Sample T test for Posttest of CG and EG.

Posttest

Mean SD Variance

df Sig.(2-taied) t

Mean

Difference

Std. Error

Difference

CG 4

8.53 2.702

7.302

.000

-.5134

-3.108

.605

EG 4

11.64 2.878

8.284

Table 5: Results of Paired Sample T test for Pretest and Posttest of EG.

N Mean SD Variance

Std. Error Mean

t df Sig. (2-taied)

Pretest

8.60 2.914 8.491

.460

-6.630

.000

Posttest 11.64 2.878 8.284

ISME 2015 - Information Science and Management Engineering III

232

ISME 2015 - International Conference on Information System and Management Engineering

232