2. Literature Review

2.1 Brief Introduction of Group Cooperation

2.1.1 The Background Information about Group Cooperation

Group cooperation, also known as cooperative learning, is by no means new idea which can be traced back to thousands years ago. In ancient china, there was a saying, learning alone leads to ignorant (from THE NOTE OF LEARNING ---- the first theoretical works to discuss systematically and carefully about the teaching of education.) And in west, there was an old saying corresponded to this idea which is four heads are better than one. For thousands years, the idea of cooperation have been valued, yet not until 1970s that cooperative learning was used as a teaching strategy. That was the time educators and scientists began to do a number of researches and made a great breakthrough. Cooperative learning was hailed as the huge step towards educational reform for its reputation of being effective. By now, the research database of cooperative learning has been rich. Among which, we can find that comparing with the traditional learning, cooperative learning promotes a greater use of higher level reasoning strategies, moral reasoning strategies, insight and critical thinking within a more flexible environment. According to Johnson (1997), cooperative learning is one of the best learning strategies, and it is the answer to those who ask for a better teaching methodology. In his word, cooperative learning is a learning strategy which based on the social psychology and is testified by a great deal of experiments. (Brandt, 1897, P12)

As for the definition of cooperative learning, cooperative learning is a learning strategy that organizes different students work together for the benefit of learning in the form of groups and teams. It aims to develop students’ cooperation to complete the task and gives reward based on the group’s total score. (王坦,2002) It is Group member‘s collaboration is the guarantee of efficiency. During the cooperation, every inpidual could participate in the process of learning, finding the useful material, popping the question, coming up with own views, asking others for information, evaluating others’ opinions, reorganizing the information, and drawing the conclusion, and sharing it with the whole class. An effective cooperation consists of students’ involvement, teacher’s direct instrument, and the suitable task which require students’ positive interdependence, inpidual and group accountability, interaction between group members and groups with the teacher, interpersonal and small group skills and group processing.

At the meanwhile the task itself should be intellectually demanding, creative, open-ended, and involve higher order thinking tasks. (Ross and Smyth, 1995)The model of cooperative learning turns the traditional one-way communication to two-way or even multi-way communication which also changes the role of teacher from information provider to listener and assessor. 

The behaviorism, sociocultural theory, humanist psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology and piagetian developmental psychology have informed the development od different approaches to cooperative learning. (e.g., Baloche, 1998, Jacobs, Power, & Loh, 2002, Johnson & Johnson, 1999, Kagan, 1994 and Slavin, 1995). But in this easy, we focus on the effect of cooperative learning on the field of second language education.