穨Review. Pdf

sometimes, seldom, and never.
A pilot test was administered to 70 randomly selected first-grade students at 
Sunny Junior High School (40 females and 30 males) to make sure that there were no 
ambiguous words or confusing statements that might affect the content validity. The 
internal-consistency reliability of .89 was obtained by the Cronbach alpha strategy.
The same questionnaire was given to the students in both groups twice, the first 
time before the study as the pre-test, and the second time after the study as the 
post-test. There were 35 copies of the questionnaire given to each group of the 
students. After checking with the answers that the participants marked on the 
questions designed for cross-validation, there was no invalid response. Therefore, 
the total number of valid questionnaires collected and analyzed was 35 in each group. 
3.3.4 Teacher Interview 
The teacher interview in this study referred to (1) the interview with the eight 
raters of the oral task, and (2) the teacher, Ms. Lee, implementing cooperative 
learning in the experimental group. In order to elicit data of greater depth than was 
possible with the above-mentioned measurements of the students’ language learning, 
the eight raters were interviewed after they turned in the grading sheets of the oral 
post-test. The interviews were done on a face-to-face, one-on-one base. Each 
interview lasted about 10 to 15 minutes. Each rater was interviewed in Chinese 
individually by the researcher. The interview was recorded with tape recorder with 
the consent of the interviewees. 
Ms. Lee was also interviewed at the end of the semester for her reflection upon 
the students’ language learning and the students’ motivation toward learning English 
as a foreign language. The semi-structured interview was tape-recorded with the 
permission of the interviewee. The questions for the semi-structured interview were 
attached in Appendix G.

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3.3.5 Student Interview 
Four high-achievers and four low-achievers in the experimental group were 
interviewed individually in Chinese about their feelings and comments on cooperative 
learning. The protocol of the interview for the students was attached in Appendix H.
One of the student teachers practicing at Sunny Junior High School conducted the 
semi-structured interview with these eight students individually. The interview was 
recorded with the permission of the interviewees. 
3.3.6 School-Wide Monthly Examinations 
The last instrument in this study included the scores from the first, the second, 
and the third monthly examinations held school-wide at Sunny Junior High School, 
gathered in the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. The major reason for 
including the scores of the school-wide monthly examination was to examine whether 
cooperative learning, as many junior high school teachers worried, would reduce the 
students’ scores on academic achievement because they spent much time doing group 
activities of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, instead of focusing on the 
preparation for structure-based written examinations.
This study was carried out in the beginning of the spring semester 2001. The 
students were required to study the mandated Junior High School English Textbook II, 
published by the National Institute of Compilation and Translation (Sung et al, 2001).
The first monthly examination tested the students on the materials from Lesson one to 
Lesson Three. And the content of the second monthly examination covered from 
Lesson Four to Lesson Seven, and that of the third monthly examination was from 
Lesson Eight to Lesson Ten. The test designers of these three school-wide monthly 
examinations were English teachers teaching in the middle schools of the Changhua 
District. 
The test items in the school monthly examinations consisted of listening 

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comprehension (30%), vocabulary (10%), grammar (20%), reading comprehension 
multiple choice (10%), alphabet writing (10%), translation into English (10%), and 
sentence completion (10%). There were three language skills, i.e. listening, reading, 
and writing, tested in the monthly examinations. But speaking was not included in 
this kind of achievement test.