| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英語教學碩士在職專班 === 94 === The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of different groupings of Cooperative Learning on an English class of vocational high school students in Taiwan. Cooperative Learning is one of the teaching techniques applied in EFL classrooms, proved to be effective in promoting students’ academic achievement, affective domain as well as improving students’ interpersonal relationship. Although many EFL teachers in Taiwan have adopted cooperative learning to their teaching, not all of them paid attention to the grouping criteria. This study aims to investigate which ability grouping, heterogeneous or homogeneous, can bring most benefits to the students in their English learning and affective domain. In other words, this study tries to probe in the effectiveness of cooperative learning, by students’ perception, whether their learning attitude, achievement and social skills are enhanced through cooperative learning. And the relationship between different ability levels of the students and their preference for different groupings is also investigated.
The grouping criteria, based on the participants’ academic achievement, divide the experiment into two stages—heterogeneous grouping and homogeneous grouping. Four cooperative learning methods are applied in the class—Students Team Achievement Division (STAD), Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT), Learning Together (LT) and Jigsaw.
Forty-two students, taught by the researcher, from the 2nd year class at a vocational high school in Taipei, have participated in this study. By conducting questionnaires after the two stages of different groupings and oral interviews at the end of the experiment, the researcher collected and analyzed the data.
The findings of the study indicate that high-ability students prefer to work with the similar-ability peers, while low-ability ones prefer to work in heterogeneous groups. The participants are positive toward the effectiveness of cooperative learning in promoting their English learning, learning attitude and social skills. By running SPSS, the statistical results also show significant difference that high-achieving students are satisfied with the improvement of their social skills and English learning more than the students of other levels when they are placed in homogeneous groups.
The study not only provides EFL teachers with an effective framework of applying cooperative learning in English class, but also offers teachers appropriate and useful suggestion in adopting different groupings. Based on the above results, some pedagogical implications for English teachers and suggestions for learning strategy instructions are provided at the end of the study.
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