Group Learning in English Oral Class of Non-English Majors in Chinese Colleges: Problems and Strategies

Since 1970s, cooperative learning has aroused wide attention from experts home and abroad and has been popular used in China’s college English learning and teaching. The current debate in education is focused on how we can continue to help students be successful both academically and socially. One way this can be achieved in classroom is through the use of cooperative learning. Compared to competitive or individual work, cooperation leads to higher group and individual learning efficiency, higher-quality reasoning strategies, greater meta-cognitive skills, and more new ideas and solutions to problems. This paper attempts to investigate group learning in English oral class of non-English majors in Chinese colleges. A qualitative study method is adopted to analyze group learning used by Chinese teachers and the achievements achieved and problems met by both students and teachers