论文总字数：37833字

摘 要

英语写作一直是听说读写四个英语语言技能中的重要组成部分，也是学生英语综合能力的体现，但是当前初中英语写作教学中存在着教师对写作不重视，读写分离，学生对英语写作不感兴趣等问题。

建构主义思想强调学习者的自主性和主动性，是一种关于知识、学习、教育教学的理论。此理论基于学习和原始知识和经验的获得是创造和理解意义的过程，并且在大多数情况下，这一过程被认为是由社会和文化的相互作用形成的。建构主义与现有的学习理论和教学原则有所不同，对教学内容的选择有很大的指导意义，可以指导如何设计教学和学习。

本文通过对建构主义写作教学案例研究，考察了建构主义在中学英语写作教育中的影响，得出了一些英语写作教学的启示，并结合英语写作教学的原则，对初中英语写作教学提供一些指导，使初中英语写作教学更有效。

关键词：建构主义;初中英语教学;英语写作

Contents

1.Introduction 1

2.Literature Review 2

3.Theories of Constructivism Related to Education 3

4.Research Design 5

4.1 Objective 5

4.2 Subjects 5

4.3 Instruments and procedure 5

4.4 Procedure of the study 7

5.Results and Pedagogical Implications 11

5.1 Results of questionnaire 11

5.2 Results of writing tests 14

5.3 Pedagogical Implications 15

6.Conclusion 16

Work Cited.........................................................................................................18

1.Introduction

Constructivism is a theory about knowledge and learning, which emphasizes learners" initiative. Academically, it occurs in the process that learners create and understand meaning based on their original knowledge and experience, and this process is often completed through social and cultural interaction. Constructivism has its ideological roots.

Constructivism has two important branches of constructivism.The first is Piaget"s cognitive constructivism. Cognitive constructivism is full of materialistic changes and advocates studying children"s cognitive development from the perspective of interaction with the inside. In addition, there is the social and cultural constructivism proposed by Vygotsky. Social and cultural constructivism emphasizes interaction and participation with the target language under the social background according to the concept of "Zone of Proximal Development"(ZPD). In other words,education is best got through the dynamic contect between teachers and students.

In English teaching,writing requires a higher level of language input and output.At the same time,writing also embodies students" integrated language competence combining with the three other skills.Writing teaching is an vital part of junior school English teaching and should be embodied in the whole process of English teaching.However, in real condition,the emergence of many new teaching materials makes teachers unable to catch up with the teaching time and often cannot provide students with the right time.Therefore,many teachers put it in an unimportant place as an urgent way to deal with the examination,and began to concentrate on the composition training in the third grade.

To solve the problems in current writing teaching,we need to search some new theories and methods to guide English writing teaching and learning.Constructivism is a relatively new concept that guide new English curriculum reform and can also give some implications to English writing teaching.

By investigating teaching cases based on constructivism,we can find how can constructivism influence the teaching of English writing in junior high school. The author hopes to study how can apply constructivism to English writing teaching, so as to provide new methods for junior high school English writing teaching and guide junior high school English writing teaching.

2.Literature Review

In the study of foreign language teaching,we can find some teaching theories that is related to constructivism and can also guide writing teaching.

According to B.F.Skinner,students can learn new knowledge by setting a stimulus-response chain and thus learning a language means form behaviour.TThis method is the most widely used in current teaching.In writing teaching,teacher may teach students common structure and usage and let students remember these and do drilling practice.That’s why writing model so popular in exams.

Cognitive theory is used to describe methods in which students are asked to think rather than repeat.This theory comes from Noam Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis.It is said that the competence to acquire a human language is part of the biologically borned equipment of the human being,and that a baby is borned with the basic rules of a language.Cognitive theory assumes that language learning need to be related to how students think and perceive the world.In writing teaching,teacher will ask students to think more about the topic and students should link the topic with the real world experience.

In junior high school English teaching, simple emphasis on "reading" in the past has resulted in a large number of students who can only read and listen but cannot write and speak. At present, English listening and speaking ability has been strengthened in teaching activities due to attention from various aspects.

In the actual writing process many students feel unable to write because they do not care about the accumulation of normal language,lack of language knowledge and lack of interest and interest in language writing.They even feel intimidated and passive when writing.There are mainly the following problems: Firstly,in English writing,many students conceive in Chinese and then translate into English.As a result, Chinese-style English often appears,making it difficult to read the whole article smoothly.Secondly,the problem of improper exercise and lack of content integrity is mainly reflected in the composition.Thirdly,there is a lack of overall sense and an disordered structure.Very few students know the structure before writing,they should not only make a good idea of the whole article and set a good theme,but also think where to write,which unless will lead to confusion in the layout of the article and lack of coherence before and after writing.

The reasons for the problems are pointed to writing teaching.Firstly, English teaching emphasizes on grammar rather than writing.The lack of attention to writing teaching is related to the examination system. The examination of grammar and vocabulary in English tests in secondary schools in China accounts for about 80%, so teachers care less about writing teaching. In addition, the assessment methods for grammar and vocabulary are mostly multiple choice questions, which don’t need students to write. Therefore, most students can only do objective questions and cannot accurately organize sentences according to the correct grammar, often "writing is wrong".Secondly, in junior school level, the teaching mode for English writing is relatively single, that is, students follow the teacher"s assigned topics such as "firstly, …; Secondly, ... "and other fixed framework for writing, and then handed over to the teacher for review, but most teachers only for grammar and vocabulary correction. This model actually turns writing into a test of grammar and vocabulary. However, due to grammar or vocabulary errors that inevitably occur in most students" compositions, their compositions are often marked and corrected a lot. Thirdly,the lack of English cultural education in English teaching process.English teaching in junior high schools seldom emphasizes the cultural differences between the east and the west, which makes students not have a thorough understanding of English culture. in the process of writing, they are easy to be influenced by Chinese method to think.They often use Chinese thoughts to organize the words, which causes the problem of "chinglish".

3.Theories of Constructivism Related to Education

From the educational point of view, the main viewpoints are Piaget"s individual constructivism and Vygotsky"s social constructivism.Constructivism was first proposed by Piaget, who was widely accepted as the founder of these theories, so his theories are the basis of constructivism. Piaget believed that children"s knowledge structure is the subjective psychological state organized by themselves, and the opposition and conflict between their internal world and the external reality. This development happens in the interaction of assimilation and adaptation, and is to achieve a balance between the state of the objective world and the subjective world.Vygotsky supports Piaget"s many opinions on children"s knowledge development, but he is very interested in children"s social changes.

There three aspacts of the theory of constructivism related to education,the first one is the theory of knowledge.According to traditional theory of knowledge,knowledge should represent a current,isolated,and be individual from the real world of the learner.Only when the knowledge can represent the isolated world correctly,it is the truth.

However,in constructivists’ views,knowledge isn’t the last solution to the problem. It will change, sublimate and revise continuously with the deepening of people"s understanding, and new explanations and assumptions will emerge. In the solution of specific problems, knowledge cannot be accurate and effective every time, but the original knowledge needs to be reprocessed and recreated according to the situation of special problems.

So,in writing class,teachers should prepare the teaching material carefully.The teaching material should not too difficult.When students learn some writing skills,they should each skill can’t be suitable in all conditions.Teachers should provide more circumstance for students to apply.All the writing content should be based on students’ experience and background and students should understand what they are writing.

The second one is the theory of learning.Form the learners’ point of view,the constructivists should answer how can human learn knowledge.In school education,we need to figure out how students learn.In transitional education,learning means the grasp of the existed knowledge;while in constructivism,we should add some special features to it.

Learning is not passively accepting knowledge , but actively constructing meaning. That is actively selecting, processing and dealing with external information according to one"s own experience background, thus obtaining one"s own meaning.Therefore, learning is not the "stimulus-respond" connection described by the Behaviorism.

So,according to constructivism,students’ learning is a gradual process,which means the writing ability can’t be improved quickly,it usually costs a long time.For students,they shouldn’t learn how to write only by passive received what teachers taught.They can better learn how to write by trying by themselves and actively joined in the writing process.At the same time,they should choose which writing contents and methods are suitable to them based on their own experience.

By concluding the theory of knowledge and learning,we can also get the theory of teaching in constructivism.In the early theory,constructivism didn’t consider teaching based on their theory,but gradually many researchers point their theory to teaching theories.As a result,many teaching theories and methods emerged.

Since knowledge is actively constructed by different people, it cannot be directly instilled into learners through the teaching process.Only by actively joining in the whole learning process, through negotiation, conversation, communication and other ways, can students construct the meaning of knowledge in the interaction with teachers.Therefore, a better and more appropriate teaching method should be the interaction and interactive teaching between teachers and students.

In writing class, interaction is in the form of interaction and communication between students and teachers and between students and students.As a learning partner and collaborator, teachers should make different learning activities for students to discuss and communicate, so that they can learn to express their own opinions and learn to listen to and understand the ideas of others.

4.Research Design

4.1 Objective

The study aims to compare writing teaching based on traditional methods with writing teaching based on constractivism.Then,to find out how to apply constructivism to writing teaching effectively.

4.2 Subjects

Two parallel classes in Nanjing private experimental middle school in Grade eight.Among them,Class5 with 38 students is taught in constructive methods as experimental class and Class6 with 35 students is taught in traditional methods as controlled class.

4.3 Instruments and procedure

The instruments of the study are questionnaire and writing tests.

4.3.1 Questionnaire(See Appendix1)

The questionnaire is divided into 2 parts.Questionnaire1should be fished by both class to analyse the situation before the experiment.Questionnaire2 should be finished by the experimental class to analyse the influence of experimental class based on constructivism.

In Questionnaire1,there are 20 items,and we can divide these items into different aspects.For item1-3,we try to figure out students’ attitude towards English writing in tests and real life.For item4-11,we try to figure out the situation of current English writing class.We want to know whether students have writing class on time,whether students like writing class.At the same time,we can know some characteristics of the writing class,whether it is teacher-oriented or student-oriented,the group activities in the class and the typical situation for the topic.For item12-16,we try to find students’ writing habits and the influence of writing class to students’ writing.We want to know the influence of typical situation,related ideas,traditional writing material and traditional writing class.For item17-19,we can learn the influence editing and assessment,especially teacher’s assessment and peer editing.The last item is aim to let students give some suggestions to traditional writing class.

In Questionnaire2,there are 10 items,,we can also divide it into different aspects.For item1-3,we try to figure out the differences between traditional writing class and experimental class based on constructivism.For item4-7,we want to know how can constructivism help students in writing,especially the construct of article,the context of topic,the activities in the class,the support from teacher and classmates.For item8-9,we want to figure out the new method of revision and assessment.The last item is also aim to let students give some suggestions.

4.3.2 Writing tests(See Appendix2)

The writing test is the topic of writing class‘Wearing designer clothes’，it includes pre-test and post-test.

Pre-test is students’ homework before the class,students use their previous knowledge to finish the composition.Post-test is finished by students after class,students can use what they have learned in the class to write.

We assess students’ composition equally,and compare the mark between before class and after class to see students’ improvement.We also compare the mark and content between controlled class and experimental class to see the effect of experimental class based on constructivism.

4.4 Procedure of the study

The experiment was carried out on April 23th,2019.Before the experiment,the result of Questionnaire1 was collected and analyzed.At the same time,the compositions of pre-writing test were assessed and the score is recorded.

During the experiment,the controlled class(Class6) was taught by their normal teacher.She used the traditional way to teach the same content.The experimental class was taught by the author.She used the methods based on the constructivism.

4.4.1 Teaching for controlled class

When the teacher teaches the controlled class,she is strictly in accordance with the teaching material and pay more attention on implementing the language point.

Sample lesson for controlled class:

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