협동학습을 통한 고등학교 영어 독해교육과 정의적 효과

This study aims to investigate the affective effects of cooperative learning in teaching English reading comprehension to high school students. While interactions of teachers and students are encouraged in Communicative Language Teaching, it is not easy to adopt these types of various interactive teaching methods in real class environments. As a result, instructors are forced to supply knowledge to students in a unilateral way, and students cannot help but respond to them passively. In this respect, we have adopted the cooperative learning method to enhance learners’ active involvements in class. Written comprehension tests and interviews were administered. The written comprehension tests, given to both the experimental and control groups, were compared to see any score differences possibly made with vs. without the application of the cooperative learning method to students. The experiment group with cooperative learning consists of 31 students; the control group with the traditional teacher-directed learning is made up of 32 students. A statistical result shows that there was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of comprehension test scores. In addition, the interviews with subjects reveal that cooperative learning is effective in trigging learners’ motivation and interests to English reading topics and increase their interactions with peers and involvements in the classroom.