Junior Middle School English Classes on the Basis of the New Curriculum Reform
Abstract: China’s entry into WTO marks a new era, which also speeds up an increasingly urgent demand of students majoring in English in China, but the English Language Teaching (ELT) in China is not efficient enough to meet this demand. To renovate the traditional educational modes, the new curriculum reform of the basic education resulted in experimental districts and has been being popularized around the whole country in these years. The New English Curriculum Standards (2001) focus on developing the students’ integrated language competence involving the students’ active participation，interactive learning ability, and communicative skills.
The new curriculum reform advocates cooperative learning. Cooperative learning, as a new effective teaching approach, is one of the dichotomy topics in ELT today. Cooperative learning provides a means for educators to positively influence communicative skills and academic outcomes for students receiving special education activities based on cooperative learning group to facilitate student motivation and active participation in the classroom. Cooperative learning promotes individual accountability, learning retention and positive social interactions. It is very helpful to ELT.
The cooperative learning practice has been making a series of changes and modifications in the EFL context in China. In the sense, it should be incorporated into the local context. This thesis discusses and probes the tenets of cooperative learning, as well as its implementation in ELT on the middle school level in Shenzhen from the perspective of the new curriculum reform. In addition, some of the problems involved in the implementation of cooperative learning with concerns about the background diversity between east and west are discussed, to match our classroom on the middle school level in Shenzhen.
Keywords: Cooperative Learning, New Curriculum Reform, Interaction, Implementation of Cooperative Learning in Junior Middle School English Classes
Contents
Abstract 1
摘 要 2
Chapter 1 Introduction 4
1.1 Backgrounds 4
1.2 Objectives and Rationales of the Study 6
Chapter 2 Literature Review 7
2.1 Theoretical Basis 7
2.1.1 Constructivism Theory 8
2.1.2 Goal Structure Theory 9
2.2 The Concept of Cooperative Learning 10
Chapter 3 Cooperative Learning Based on the New Curriculum Reform 11
3.1 The Target of the New Curriculum Standards 11
3.2 Perspectives of Cooperative Learning Based on the New Curriculum Reform 12
Chapter 4 Implementation 15
4.1 Elements of Cooperative Learning 15
4.2 Structural Approaches of Cooperative Learning 18
4.3 Three Assumptive Samples of Cooperative Learning Structural Approaches in the Junior Middle School English Classes 20
4.3.1 The design of the samples 20
4.3.2 The procedures of the samples 20
4.4 Problems Confronted 23
Chapter 5 Conclusion 25
References: 27
Acknowledgements 27
