Chapter 1 Introduction

Beijing, as the political and cultural center of China, attracts an increasingnumber of foreign citizens, who help build the city into a modern metropolis.However, this trend brings with it several challenges as well, particularly in terms ofpublic security management, as we have witnessed more cases of foreign citizensinvolved in law offences like illegal immigration, traffic accidents, drug abuse ordisrupting the public order. Thus, to ensure effective communication, it’s crucial andurgent for the Capital law enforcement team to have reasonable proficiency in English,the preferred communication tool for many expatriates and international visitors.The researcher joined Beijing Police College’s English faculty in early 2012, andbecame a member of the reforms team. After three years’ teaching experience, theresearcher has found that there are basically two problems behind the lack ofefficiency in students’ English study. Firstly, if the teacher adopts the teacher-centeredapproach and talks too much, the students would not pay attention in class. Secondly,the less motivated students do not take the initiative to prepare for the materials beforeclass as required, due to the feeling that there is relatively low drop-out rate in theschool and more than 90 percent of the students are secured a job after graduation. Inother words, the “safety net” mentality leads to a lack of motivation.The researcher and his colleagues in the reform team then decided to analyze theproblems more deeply and attempted to figure out measures to solve them bycombining the methods of both Action Research (AR) and Cooperative Learning (CL).On one hand, on the teacher’s side, in Australian scholar Anne Burns’ (Burns 2010)view,AR can be a very rewarding approach to improve our teaching skills and acquiremore insight of ourselves as educators, our classrooms and our students. On the otherhand, on the students’ part, CL is a revolutionary trend worldwide in terms oflanguage teaching reform. As American professor Vermette (1998) in NiagaraUniversity argued, the reason why CL has such momentum is that it has transformedthe teaching mode of the lecturer just talking, and the students passively listening.The main questions here, are that how we apply the AR theory and CL theory tothe reality in a school like Beijing Police College, in other words, how do wecustomize to the particular needs of students to better prepare them both for thenational English proficiency test and also for the future policing work? How can wearouse the students’ interest to learn English and more importantly, to learn to studyindependently?

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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Major Views onAction Research

In the past decade or so, AR has become increasingly popular in languageteaching. The reason behind the popularity is that language teachers worldwide wantto become educators who offer better learning opportunities for their students withencouragement and efficiency.Carr and Kemmis refers to AR as “‘self-pondering investigation’ used bypractitioners in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social oreducational practices as well as their perspectives of these measures and the scenariosin which these practices are implemented ” (Carr and Kemmis 1986:220).Elliott describes the nature of AR as “the analysis of a social circumstance withthe outlook to raise the quality of the action in it” (Elliott 1991:69).From a methodology point of view, Somekh believes that AR is “an adaptiveresearch, not only involves being moderate in research approaches, but more basicallyin seeking to cater to the social situation in which it is practiced” (Somekh1993:26-28).Van Lier gives AR a philosophical look by stating that AR is “an active,well-planned involvement in the function of the real world and a thorough inspectionof the influence of such intervention” (van Lier 1996:32).The comprehensive take of Anne Burns on AR is that it is “a self-reflective,organized and objective effort to enquiry by participants who simultaneously belongto the analyst groups. The aim is to find troubled situations or issues considered by theparticipants to be worthy of research in order to render possible critically informedchanges in practice” (Cornwell 1999:23:12:5).

2.2 Studies on Cooperative Learning

Contemporary language teaching has been perfected by the theory of CL.Language educators and researchers have witnessed encouraging achievements in thisfield in terms of both academic analysis and in classroom practice. Several dedicatedresearchers and experts have contributed to the study and discussed theirunderstandings of CL.In the late 20thcentury, international language educators and experts carried outexcellent researches on CL, some of which include: the positive influence of CL inenhancing social relationships and in shaping up the persona of participants (Johnsonand Johnson, 1989); The impact of CL in raising the quality and efficiency ofacademic subject learning; the more feasible type of CL in the phase ofimplementation (Slavin, 1995:79).Under the trend of emphasizing students-centered teaching strategy, the need tostimulate students’ interest, foster their spirit of life time learning, and help themdevelop a sense of cooperation and competition is urgent. That is exactly where CLcomes in. Studies have revealed that CL works better than other approaches ifteachers design carefully and keep adjusting the “tactics”. In comparing CL with otherlearning and teaching approaches, the main objective is to find out the effect of CL onstudents’academic performance.

Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework....................10

3.1 Major Characteristics of College English Teaching.......10
3.2 Major Steps ofAction Research at the Instructional Level................11
3.3 Theoretical Basisof Cooperative Learning............13
Chapter 4 Research Instruments and Discussion of Results...............18
4.1 Description of Subjects and Research Instruments.............18
4.2 The Reform Experiment...............20
4.3An Analysis of the Experiment Results....................27

Chapter 4 Research Instruments and Discussion ofResults

4.1 Description of Subjects and Research Instruments

The researcher chooses two classes as the subjects of study. The two classesshare the same size and similar gender ratio: there are 41 students in each class andaltogether 9 female students. All of them are in their freshman year in the secondacademic semester, so the majority of the students are 19 or 20 years old. The twoclasses are majored in Criminal Investigation and Traffic Management respectively. Interms of thehigh school experience of learning English, students share similarbackground because all of them come from Beijing area, and studied the same type oftextbooks from designated publication.The textbooks the students use during class are New Horizon College English(NHCE). In the two semesters of their freshman year, students attend English classtwice a week, each lecture lasts two class periods (90 minutes). In the first lecture ofthe week they usually study the Reading and Writing version of NHCE, and duringthe second lecture they normally learn using the Viewing and Listening and Speakingtext book. The format of these two major textbooks resemble each other, in that eachunit contains the reading or listening text based on certain topics, vocabulary andsentence structure, and tasks designed to enable students to practice their spokenEnglish and communication skills with the language points they learned. In practice,the teachers in BPC often add in some new content outside the textbooks as acomplement to the textbook.

4.2 The Reform Experiment

During the first semester which was the beginning for students’ collegeexperience, the researcher remembered all the names of the 82 target students and hada general idea of the students’ English proficiency. This not only improved theteacher-student relationship but also facilitated the interaction in both class hours andafter class guidance. The researcher attempted to improve efficiency and students’hands-on experience by putting them into groups and assign them with different tasksto do presentation. The following observations were the problematic issues that theresearcher found. The early observation is that students paid attention towhattheteachersaidduring class hours, apparently a sign of showing respect for teacher and also a successof the interactive design of the teacher. However, due to the attention span of studentsand the lack of interaction among students themselves, namely the communicationbetween the audience groups and the presenting groups, there were moments whenstudents felt boring and just spent time passively ‘being crammed’.Furthermore, the disappointing results of the little written tests showed thatnearly half of the students did not well grasp the content of the teaching materials,because theydidn’t spend enough time after class to practice what they learned nordid they finish the written homework seriously. In addition, although students weregiven instructions on how to prepare for the text study, some complained thatcomprehending the text was beyond their ability because of the difficult language andlack of interest in the topics of the text. They simply did not know where to begin.The result of the final written exam also showed that quite a number of students didnot master thelanguage points that the teachers explained during class, a proof thatstudents did not practice what they learned after class.

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Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Summary of the Major Findings

Firstly, in an environment where students are lack of interest and motivation tolearn yet English language will be so important in their career development, CLgroups with students’ competition could be adopted as a useful method, in regard tothe positive impact it has on making classroom more active and also on the after classstudies of students.Secondly, the effectiveness of the teaching reform is proved by the improvementin the written test scores of the two pilot classes. The researcher also witnesses theinitiative that students take in becoming involved in the classroom, and higherefficiency is a sign of the enhancement of students’self-studying ability.Thirdly, professionalschools should offer students some career-related trainingand make the teaching content more relevant by fully utilizing the available resources.Therefore, the most effective way of making Policing English part of the successfulcollege English class is that teachers should blend the language in the teachingmaterials with real policing scenarios, by carefully choosing the topics and designing
students’activities.

5.2 Limitations of the Study

First of all, the researcher had less than three years of college teachingexperiences before participating in the tentative research, and the teaching experienceaverage ofother colleagues in the reform team was also no more than six years.therefore, in the process of putting the target theory intopractice,inefficiencyandinconsistencymight occur.And then, the period of research lasted five months, which created enoughtime to finish the experiment process. However, a longer period like an entireacademic year might create a more compelling result for the research.Finally, because of the ‘trial and error’ nature of the research, the scope of thetarget students just involved two classes, whereas a much larger group in the wholegrade might lead to more objective outcome.The researcher sincerely wishes that more counterparts in the English teachingfield could join in and continue the research. The teaching and learning research donot and will not end here, because the on-going effort of English teaching researchwill yield more fruitful results.

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參考文獻(xiàn)（略）

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