毕业设计（论文）-构建主义理论在中学英语写作的运用.doc

泉 州 师 范 学 院毕 业 论 文 The Application of the Constructivism in the middle school English Writing 构建主义理论在中学英语写作的运用 外国语 学 院 英语教育 专 业 09 级 1班 学生姓名 何文斌 学号 090201005 指导老师 张万义 职称 教 授 完成日期: 2012年12月10日 Abstract: It is a common knowledge that the writing teaching is the important content of English teaching in junior middle school. The writing in the process of English learning is of great importance. Besides, one of the most teaching goals is to help students develop the elementary ability of writing. However, in the majority of the junior middle school in China, lots of teachers tend to use the traditional methods in the writing, that is, they impart and the students accept passively. Although this method may be helpful for part of students to get the high mark, for students themselves, it is important to cultivate students writing ability. This paper explains the meaning of English writing and analyzes the current situations of writing in the junior middle school, then introduces the Construction Theory including its concept of teaching and learning, concludes how to guide the English writing task in the junior middle school under the application of the Construction Theory to make teachers have a specific purpose of the aims of English writing as well as acquire this theory better., thus to avoid attaching too much importance to the marks of writing in the process of teaching and neglect cultivating the ability of writing.Key words: the writing teaching，the Construction Theory，the junior middle school，cultivate the ability of writing 【摘 要】众所周知，写作教学是初中英语教学的重要内容，写作在英语学习过程中是必不可少的。并且初中英语教学目标之一就是帮助学生培养基本的写作能力。但是目前在我国绝大部分初中，很多老师在写作教学中仍然实行传统教学-老师传授，学生被动接受。尽管这种方法或许在某种程度上也出现部分学生写作分数高的现象，但对于学生而言，写作教学能力的培养才是最重要的。本文通过解释英语写作的含义和分析我国当前初中英语写作存在现状，介绍了构建主义理论以及其教学观、学习观，论述教师在写作扮演的角色，总结归纳如何在构建主义理论下更好指导初中英语写作教学，使初中英语老师更加明确了写作的教学目的以及正确地掌握这一理论，避免在今后在写作教学中只重视学生写作分数，而忽视学生能力的培养。【关键词】写作教学, 构建主义 , 初中 ,写作能力培养 ContentsIntroduction11. The Definition and the Situation of Writing.21.1 The definition of English Writing21.2 The Situation of the Writing.21.2.1 The Students Problem in Writing.21.2.2 The Situation of Writing Teaching32. The construction Theory.32.1 The Construction Theorys Concept of Teaching.4 2.2 The Construction Theorys Concept of Learning.43. The Role of Teachers in the Writing.63.1.1 The Designer of Writing Tasks.63.1.2 The Organizers of Various Activities.63.1.3 The Promoters of Writing Activities.63.1.4 The Creators of the Human Environment74.The Construction Theorys Applied Strategy in the Writing.74.1 Provide a Positive Writing Psychological Scaffolding.7 4.2 Provide Interactive Scaffolding.8 4.2.1Brainstorming.8 4.2.2 Games and Activities.9 4.2.3 The Contest.9 4.3 Provide the Scaffolding of Evaluation.9 4.3.1 The focus of teacher evaluation.10 4.3.2 Establish Portfolios and Implement the Evaluation.10Conclusion11Bibliography.11Introduction English as a foreign language has existed for a long time in China. A increasing number of people have paid great attention to English teaching due to the practice of the Opening and Reform Policy . Besides, There are four basic skills in the process of English learning-listening, speaking, reading and writing. Of all, writing is a kind of compressive expression ability. And teaching English writing in the junior middle school is an important process by which the students gain the writing skills. However,it cannot be neglected that English writing teaching still has a long way to reach the national English level on account of Chinese traditional teaching method. Therefore ,what teachers need to do is how to change the situation in which teachers just give students a topic and then mark these compositions in the traditional approach writing and fostering students interests in writing is the issue that all the countries encounter nowadays.Although there are many writing teaching approaches available, it is still difficult to find an effective and satisfactory approach in English writing teaching of junior middle school. As constructivism gets more concerns from the researchers in teaching，some constructists have put forward various reforms to shapestudent-centered model in classroom teaching, trying to cultivate students motivation and initiation of writing ,interaction with teachers.While just recently brought to the forefront of educational theories,the roots of constructivism can be dated back to the 18th century to the Italian sociology, and education woven into its history. However, many major contemporaries contribute to the development of a clearer idea of constructivism and its possible implication for education. These include Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner,and Ausbel. John Dewey provided a foundation for constructivism. He believed that teaching should be built based on what learners already knew and engage learners in learning activities. Zemelamn, Daniels, and Hyde(1993) tells that learning in all subject areas involves inventing and constructing new ideas. They suggest that the Construction Theory be incorporated into the curriculum, and advocate that teachers create a environment in which students can construct their own understandings. And Bruner defines constructivism as a learning theory,which holds that learning is an active process in which learners construct their ideas or concepts based upon their current an past knowledge(Kearsley,1999).Cunningham and Duffy identified two major silimarities that are the foundation of all constructivist theories. They are:learning is an active process of supporting that construction rather than communicating knowledge(Cunningham & Duffy, 1996, p.1772)The author holds the idea that in order to reach the aims of the New English Curriculum Criterion towards writing, teachers can not follow the old traditional writing instruction but as guiders ,teachers can stimulate students interests and encourage them to have enough interaction both in and out of class under the application of the Construction Theory in English writing.This paper is going to discuss mainly the connotation of the Construction Theory ,such as its concept of teaching and learning, as well as its applied strategy in the writing.1. The Definition and the Situation of Writing What is the English writing? And there are two main problems of writing in the junior middle school including the students and the teachers.1.1 The definition of English WritingWriting is not only an extremely complex psychological process, but also is an important component of communicative ability. Writing, as an output activities, reflects the students English comprehensive ability and plays an important role in the English teaching.“ Writing has two meanings, which can refer to writing as well as the process of output”. The double meaning of writing on writing teaching has a very important guiding significance. It is helpful for us to recognize the phenomenon of the traditional writing teaching-overvalue the result but neglect the object.1.2 The Situation of the Writing With the deepening of Chinas reform and opening-up and the formation of global economic integration, English as an international language plays an important role in the politics, economy, culture, education and other fields. Teachers should improve their quality of English teaching, which is important for students to use English better in the future. Writing in the exams is in the high proportion and it is one of the most difficult parts that improve four skills. Regarding the current situation of English teaching in the junior high school, the majority of students complete the writing task at the request of the teacher and rarely check articles carefully again. Some fear the writing, even have lost the confidence in it and do not want to write any more. Therefore, writing is a big bottle neck for students, which should attach great importance to it and find out the effective way to solve.1.2.1The Students Problem in Writing1) The Mode of ThinkingChinese students, affected by traditional modes of thinking, often apply some vocabulary or expressions in Chinese to the articles, so it produces the so-called Chinglish. Whats more, Chinese way of thinking is circular, so students often center on the main idea to state, while the Western way of thinking is a straight line, put forward the topic directly and demonstrate this point one-by-one. Therefore, students will make lots of mistakes in their articles.2) The Problem of the Grammar Traditional grammar teaching is more around the examination, so students only acquire the understand syntax rather than the expression one, during which, they do well in doing simple grammar multiple choice questions. However, writing needs to be flexible in the usage of the learned grammar into sentences to express ideas. In a word, there are so many problems such as, serious basic syntax errors, morphology, the weak ability of syntax, the poor language, poor sense of language, the short analysis of the information. 3) The Problem of DiscourseTheir articles is poor in discourse layout, lack of discourse cohesion, logicality and logical. Most students are careless in examining the topic before starting to write and even some deem the practice of Chinese as English translation. So the article is loosely structured within the lack of theme.4) The Problem of VocabularyIt is no doubt that writing is to test the students reproduction capability and ask students to own a solid word foundation in their composition. To write a good article, enough vocabulary is a prerequisite for it. Due to the students poor vocabulary, a word or phrase is often used repeatedly in the process of writing, such an article lacks of language change and tedious. Sometimes students make mistakes in spelling and use the improper words although they think for a long time.1.2.1 The Situation of Writing TeachingWriting is a process to pass the information to the reader.(Erika Lindermanma, 1987).The course of writing is of great value for both teachers and students,for the process of using language is the manifestation of English proficiency (Wu Cun dao, 1991).However, there is a big problem: most of the teachers emphasize how to teach students while they hardly stress that how to learn for students, who have little opportunity to join in the teaching activity. 1) No pay attention to students communicative abilityTeaching activities remained just to explain the content of the texts, for example, the language of expression and grammar, etc. Although students understand what teachers teach in class clearly, they do not have enough opportunity to communicate in the language environment. When writing, they dont know what to do or how to do next.2) No pay enough attention to cultivating the ability of writing.However, in the real teaching, teachers often spend less time in writing and just ask students to complete them in the form of the layout for homework assignments. Of course, there are few students to do them as required, as a result, student mode of thinking is inactive.2. The construction TheoryThe Construction Theory is the newest teaching theory in western educational psychology, originally proposed by the famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1960s,later other psychologists and educators such as Vygotsky ,etc. enriched and developed respectively from the nature and development conditions of the cognitive structure, which formed the complete constructivism. It emphasizes the initiative of learning and students are the builders of their own cognitive structures, rather than the passive information receivers with nothing in the head into the classroom. The teaching isnt the course of teaching textbook knowledge, but it should help students build gradually deepening intelligent structure in the basis of personal knowledge and experience.2.1. The Construction Theorys Concept of TeachingConstructivist emphasizes learning is the process that students take the initiative to build their own knowledge rather than teachers transfer something to the students, in the same way , learners are not passive receivers of the stimulus, but active builders of their own knowledge structure. the United States contemporary sociologists (Von Glasemfield) thinks: “knowledge is not passively absorbed, but actively built by the cognitive subject”. (Von Glasemfield, 1995), it means learning is active and the learner is not a passive learner of the stimulus who needs to do active selection and process of external information leading to the concept of change and structural reorganization under the new and old experience conflict. The learning process is not about simple information input, storage and retrieval,but is about between the old and new experience in the two-way interaction. (Chen Qi, 1998). Assimilation refers to put learners external information into existing cognitive structure, in order to enrich and strengthen the existing thinking tendencies and behavior patterns. Adaptation is the process between the learners existing cognitive structure and new external conflict causing the adjustment and change of original cognitive structure as to establish a new cognitive structure .Assimilation is the quantitative change of the structure, and adaptation is the qualitative change in the cognitive structure. Learning is the process of assimilation, adaptation, re-assimilation, re-adaptation, etc. (Xu Jie, 2001)2.2 The Construction Theorys Concept of LearningConstructivism thinks that knowledge is not imparted by teachers, but learners get it with the help of others in certain situations-the social and cultural context，such as the interpersonal collaboration, language discussion activities. Therefore, the “situation”,“collaboration”,“session”and“meaning construction”are the four elements of the learning environment for constructivism. Situation：the“situation”of the learning environment must be conducive to the students to build on what they have learned. In the Constructivism learning environment, teaching design should not only be related to the teaching objective analysis but also should be considered to be beneficial for students to build the creation of situations, whats more, collaboration exists in the learning process. Collaborative plays an important role in the collection and analysis of learning materials the submission and verification of assuming as well as the evaluation of learning outcome. “Session”：the session is an indispensable part in the process of writing. The study group members must discuss how to complete the required learning task, besides the process of collaborative learning is that of the session, in which each learners ideas is shared by the entire learning community, so “session” is one of the important means to build “Meaning construction”：it is the ultimate goal of the whole learning process. The significance of building is the intrinsic link in the nature and law of things. In the learning process, to help students construct meaning is to help them reach a more profound understanding of the intrinsic link in the nature and law of things，so after that they form the learned style by its long-term storage.From the above constructivism theory, how much knowledge learners acquire depends on the ability of their own based on their own experience to build the knowledge significance, rather than depends on how much knowledge their teachers impart, nor depends on their ability to remember and recite the content their teachers teach. 3. The Role of Teachers in the WritingIn the traditional education, the relationship of teacher-student is content-giving and content-receiving. However, constructivism positions the roles of teachers and students, challenge the traditional teacher-student relationship. It requires teachers to update their concepts and behaviors of education, walk into the students from the rostrum, establish an equal relationship between teachers and students, create free development space for students, get rid of the absolute authority of the teachers. Of course, the teacher should become enlighteners to stimulate students desire for knowledge, conductors of learning methods, guiders of ethical behaviors and transfer the teaching mode“teachers taking the knowledge to the students” into“teachers taking the students to move toward the knowledge. The new teacher-student relationship of equality, democracy, harmony is not only the quest of constructivism but also a fundamental guarantee for the smooth implementation of the new curriculum reform. The process of constructivism is that of social interaction among teachers and students, students with their peers and that of cultivating students self-learning ability. Therefore, teachers provide all kinds of support to promote interaction between teachers and students. In the interaction among classmates, teachers just play a role as guiders while students are the main body of self-learning. The teachers give support, enco