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The systematic research on cooperative learning in our country started at the end of the 1980s. Group activities began to enter class teaching at the beginning of the 1990s. Therefore it led to the inquiry about cooperative learning. And much progress was made in the mid-1990s. At the beginning of the 21st century it is its mature period (Wang Tan, 2001: 116). In our country the earliest areas where the research on the subject was done tentatively were Shandong Province and Zhejiang Province. In Zhejiang the subject of their research was how to improve all-round development of the students’ characteristics, in which group interactive cooperative learning is involved. In Shandong, the researchers not only paid attention to the theoretical research, they also put cooperative learning into classroom teaching and obtained some experience. Cooperative learning is such an efficient activity that it has been widely used all over the world. In our country, it is also widely used in teaching. But to the combination of cooperative learning and English teaching in junior school, there is no concrete and detailed research about it. So I try doing some searches on it in my paper.
2. Literature Review
Cooperative learning is an ancient concept and practice of education. From written records, the concept of co-education can be traced back masterpiece of classical can be traced back masterpiece of classical education ‘Record of Learning.’ To study all by oneself without a friend makes one ignorant and ill-informed. It advocates that in the learning process, we need to learn from each other and share experiences with each other, in order to increase the efficiency of learning. In the West, as early as the first century, Ancient Rome pointed out that students can benefit from each other to teach. Early 18th century, the British clergyman Bebel and Lancaster in England conducted extensive experiments, their ideas spread to the United States in the early 19th century. During this period, the most outstanding representative of cooperative learning American educator, Parker, he served as an administrator in Massachusetts (1875-1880). Annual averages of more than 30,000 visitors come to test his cooperative learning using the case method. Later, the famous educator John Dewey, J promoted the use of cooperative learning groups in teaching, and treated it as a part in his famous designs (Slavin, 1996: 68).
Cooperative learning is now an accepted and often the preferred instructional procedure at all levels of education. Cooperative learning is presently used in schools and universities in every part of the world, in every subject area, and of children of all ages. It is difficult to find a text on instructional methods, a teacher’s journal, or instructional materials that do not discuss cooperative learning. Materials on cooperative learning have been translated into dozens of languages. Cooperative learning is now an accepted and highly recommended instructional procedure.
Cooperative learning is a whole set of teaching methodologies and strategies. It takes cooperative groups as the basic classroom structure. It differs in learner-centered teaching from the traditional model of teacher-centered teaching. It arose in the America in the early 1970s and was greatly developed during the period from middle 1970s to middle 1980s (Guo Yanbing, 2002: 9)．Now it has been widely used in different subjects teaching in primary school, middle school and college classrooms in such countries as the USA, Canada, Germany, England, Holland, Japan and Australia and so on. Some researchers, such as David and Roger Johnson，Shlomo，Yael Sharan and Slavin have made valuable attempts to develop the theory and application of cooperative learning．This approach is believed to be more effective than traditional ones．Cooperative learning was put forward as early as 1900s by John Dewey, who emphasized education as a vehicle for teaching citizens to live cooperatively in a social democracy. A second major figure in the history of cooperative learning is social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who in the 1930s and 1940s emphasized the importance of group dynamics in understanding the behavior of leaders and members of democratic groups. More recently, David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota，Shlomo Sharan at the University of Tel Aviv, and Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins have been among the researchers helping develop cooperative learning into one of the best-researched pedagogical approaches in education over the last thirty years. Through lots of studies, they have found that cooperative learning is superior to more traditional forms of instruction and is rarely inferior to other forms of instruction in producing achievement, critical thinking, self-esteem, racial/ethnic relations, and interpersonal attraction.