Liu, F. & Li, K. & Xu, F. (2009). Applying constructivism to teaching college English writing. US-China Foreign Language. 75(7), 22-29.
This research reported the application of constructivism theories to college English writing education, the result of which showed that the constructivism improved students’ writing performance, autonomous and cooperative learning and critical thinking. This article did a thorough literature review of constructivist point of view of learning. The author quoted Von Glasersfeld (1995) explanation of learning as: “From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon. It requires self-regulation and the building of conceptural structures through reflection and abstraction”.
The stimulus-response behaviorism was once prevailing in China’s English education and even Chinese education today. The practice of this theory contributed to the success in standardized examination and thus gained more power to exist.
The concept of instructors and learners from social constructivist approach is rather revolutionary to lots of teachers. The author collected the comparison made by researchers between roles of teachers and instructors. This is revolutionary for both China’s language teachers and learners. According to my knowledge of China’s educational context and practice, the change of roles of teachers and learners is the most fundamental precondition for the success of this research.
The subjects of this research are 59 sophomores with 6 years of English learning experiences. The duration of the experiment was 24 weeks in one academic year. The instruments were two writing tests, two semi-structured questionnaires, subjects’ retrospective and introspective reports, and the teacher’s diary.
The teaching involved 11 steps: 1. Reading the essay as input; 2. Planning; 3. Drafting; 4. Self-evaluation and first draft; 5. Peer-evaluation; 6. The second revision; 7. Teachers’ response; 8. Teachers’ comment on students’ writings in class; 9. The third revision; 10. Teachers’ task of grading essays; 11. Students’ task of writing retrospective and introspective reports.
Yet, I failed to find out, from this article, how teachers scaffold students to discover answers to some more specific questions. To me, those difficulties are hard for students themselves to overcome, like how to express those ideas involving the understanding or enculturation of the secondary Discourses (as described in Gee’s article) without having much contact with the social context of that culture.
About the aspect that the writing course improved students’ English writing performance, 44% of students reported “exploring the writing topic”; 22% reported “building vocabulary”; 37% reported “outlining ideas”, 56% reported “revising drafts”.
About the aspects that the writing course improved students’ comprehensive capabilities, 47% reported “autonomous learning”; 59% reported “analyzing and solving problems”; 39% reported “cooperative spirit” and 22% reported “trust in the process of reasoned inquiry, prudence in making judgment”.
Thought the article proved that the constructivism-based writing course “helped the increase of students’ interest in English writing, to improve their writing performance, to cultivate their ability of autonomous and cooperative learning, to develop their critical thinking and to enhance their comprehensive abilities (p. 28)”, the author pointed out that some students are not used to this teaching style because of the influence of the style of their former teachers. As the author said that the success of the writing course heavily depends on instructors’ and learners’ better understanding of the concept of learning, and their positive attitudes towards the reform.
I think this approach of teaching is more meaningful to and welcome by college students who have been fed up with being trained to repeat learning points for 12 years. Recently, a friend of mine, who is now an exchange student to one of the top universities in my province, joyfully told me that he was going to leave China and return to UNM. He said he was asked to memorize a lot of things in his language school, which was a very different experience when he was in Spain, Israel.
The research reported above is a new direction to language learning in China.
WOW, there is a lot of insightful information that this author is giving. I have definitely had an English class or two that operated in this way, with all 11 points. The class that comes to mind was my third English class in college on expository writing, the entire class revolved around a single book and five articles of our choosing and we had to thoroughly investigate and understand all 11 points that was mentioned in the text. Although it was intensive and the subject began to become very repetitive, I have never done better in an English class in my academic career. It was a very rewarding experience.
ReplyDelete