Abstract

Recently, cooperative learning has been the hot spot of people’s attention. As one of the mainstreams of today’s learning theories, more and more social psychologists and educationalists advocate cooperation in students’ learning. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of cooperative learning on the word-building task in EFL classes. One hundred and fifty students, divided into experimental group and control group, participated in this study. In the experiment, the participants in the experimental group completed the word-building tasks of different degrees in pairs, whereas the participants in the control group accomplish the same tasks by individual. Before this experiment, students in experimental group did similar tasks individually. Then they did the tasks for four weeks and three times a week as how they did in the former experiment. After four weeks, the students in experimental group did the similar tasks by individual again. The results showed that participants in the experimental group achieved significantly higher scores than the participants in the control group. And compared the tasks of low level and high level, the participants in the experimental group had more obvious superiority on tasks at medium level. These reveals that cooperative learning helps EFL learners achieve better in co-construction of morphological knowledge. And the effect of cooperative learning do varies with the difficulty of tasks.       

Keywords: cooperative learning; word-building task; effect; short-term; long-term; difficulty

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1.-Introduction-1

2.-A Survey of Cooperative learning-1

2.1.-The advantages of cooperative learning-2

2.2.-The elements of cooperative learning-2

2.3.-The techniques of cooperative learning-3

3. Method-5

3.1. Participants-5

3.2. Instrumentation-5

3.3. Design-6

3.4. Procedure-6

3.5. Analysis-7

4. Results-7

4.1 The first question-7

4.2 The second question-7

4.3 The third question-7

4.4 The Fourth question-8

5. Discussion-9

Conclusion-10

References-11