Literature Review

1. Competitive Activities

Cooperative activities have been popularly organized in junior English class recently. While in contrast to the social Darwinist paradigm of competition being centered on the survival of the fittest, cooperative learning is in favor of a win-win orientation and gained momentum on competitiveness (Johnson, 2009: 367). About cooperative classroom, Johnson illustrates, “Ideally, teachers are trained to take their existing lessons and restructure them to be cooperative as cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning” Deutsch (2006) holds the basic elements in cooperative learning are inpidual accountability and personal responsibility, positive interdependence,  promotive interaction, appropriate use of social skills, and group processing. Therefore, cooperative learning exists when students work in teams to accomplish shared learning goals together and it seems to suggest that cooperative learning is contrary to competitive learning. (Johnson, 2000: 133). Actually, in this study, learning in competitive activities is not the opposite of learning cooperative activities.

Competition is a special form for organizing classroom activities and often regarded as “a powerful motivator for student behavior regularly applied in education research” (Chen Zhihong, 2014:1). Studies have found that “competitive learning (win-lose orientation) is used for the purpose of evaluating the position of people in various tasks” (Hamid & Marashi, 2013:2). In other words, we may get the application of competitive activities is beneficial, motivating and helpful. Ping Shen (2007) suggests the definition of competitive activities should be a variety of classroom activities that all the students take an active part in to prove and improve their ability and value. She holds that learning in competitive activities means a special psychological and emotional experience that transfers outside winning motivation into inner learning ambition. Therefore, in a word, competitive activities make full use of nonintellectual factors, such as interest, motivation, emotion, etc. to guide students engage in English class and learn better.

It is considered that there are two sorts of competitive activities in class: one is inpidual competition, and the other is group competition. The former is more likely to stimulate students’ learning enthusiasm, develop inpidual’s talent and strength, and satisfy their need of self-express; while the latter encourages students to cooperate with each other, develops a team spirit and offers a good chance for students to learn better how to work out the problem cooperatively. (Wen Tongsheng, 2007: 31) In this study, competitive activity refers to the latter. The whole class is grouped, students cooperate with the group members and meanwhile each group competes with other groups. From this perspective, it is obvious that competitive activities are also regarded as the cooperative activities in this research.

2. Competitive Activities in English Learning

Generally speaking, in the light of the review, advantages of competitive activities in English learning can be concluded mainly from the aspects of interest, motivation, and emotions.

Successful competitive activities can stimulate students’ English learning interest and encourage students to take active parts in classroom activities. Learning English in competitive activities itself may be an interest for students, which can be regarded as a powerful motivator and a crucial part in intrinsic motivation and self-determination (Danuta, 2012: 211). Certain contents or objects in competitive activities will directly arouse interest, such as knowledge, concrete things, a topic, an idea, events, and activities (Schiefele, 1991; Krapp, 2002.). Interest take great responsibility for what is learnt and how well it is learnt in competitive activities. In this study, the characteristics of interest in learning guide teachers in the following three aspects: 1) the choice of topic in competitive activities; 2) the organizing form about competitive activities; 3) the communicative situations in learning activities.