Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
After absorbing the foreign experience of education and analyzing our own context, Chinese education is experiencing a momentous revolution. There comes the New Curriculum reform. According to it a fundamental ability is demanded that the students are encouraged to practice teamwork with their partners. This requires the educators to transform their teaching methods. It is reasonable that the students take the main role which used to be the teachers’ in the class length by length. Simultaneously, the students should be motivated to cooperate with others and create something consciously. Basically, it is beneficial to both the learners and teachers that the teachers are to arouse the learners’ ability and enthusiasm to work with others. Teachers’ main task is to let students master the skill of studying, cooperating and communicating. Due to the geographical and economical reasons, in some remote and less developed areas the education circumstance and situation are not satisfactory. Especially in the IELTS speaking classes, there are even no teachers teaching IELTS courses. Most of the teachers just tell the learners vocabularies and sentence patterns and then let them make sentences using the words and phrases. In principle the students have only mastered the basic knowledge. However they cannot put the knowledge into practice. That is to say they don not know how to use it effectively in real life.
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1.2 Purpose of the Study
This research is designed to the influence of Cooperative Learning on IELTS speaking study, applying of four kinds of research methods: questionnaire, classroom observation and pretest aiming to realize the current situation of IELTS speaking teaching and posttest aiming to find how Cooperative Learning develop IELTS speaking teaching The research is to answer the following questions: What is the current situation of IELTS speaking learning? 2) What are the influences of Cooperative Learning on IELTS students’ speaking learning?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Theoretical Foundation of Cooperative Learning
Fundamentally, there are loads of theories which affect Cooperative Learning in many aspects. Among them, some fundamental and noted ones are Social interdependence theory, construction theory, motivation theory and multiple intelligence theory. When it was the 1st century, a well-known ancient Rome educator Quintilian had proposed that students can gain some profits by teaching and learning from each other, not only just between the teacher and students but also among students. In about 500 A.D. the Talmud had requested that the way to get a better understanding of this book is to find a study partner. At the end of the 18th century, English churchmen, Lancaster and Bell applied Cooperative Learning comprehensively, according to which they divided students into several groups and put forward a notion of ‘students tutor’ which was a strategy that advocated students studying in a group. In 1806 this th
