The Exploration Of Teachers' Contributions To ELT Of Tertiary-level In China Within Social Constructivism

Ever since a long time, the role relationship between teachers and learners' has been unbalanced, featured with teacher's dominance and control in classroom and learners' passive acceptance of whatever teachers say and do to them. But with the development of educational psychology going deeper into the individual being, such an unbalanced relationship is receiving more and more questioning and critics. Some persons, driven by the influx of various theories about second language acquisition (SLA) abroad, strongly advocate for learner-centered approach in Chinese foreign language classroom, completely reversing the current role relationship. As such, in the field of foreign language education, a hot argument and research about the role relationship between teachers and learners emerged. Unfortunately, however, no agreement has yet been reached in this respect up to now. Inspired by this, the present researcher intends to firstly make clear what and how much influence the teachers actually impose on English language learning (ELL) and based on this, hope to get a more objective and scientific view about this issue.Because in China, English language teaching (ELT) or ELL is so widely talked about that it has nearly become the "mouthpiece" of foreign language teaching (FLT) or foreign language learning (FLL), and besides, the researcher has an easier access to ELT of Tertiary-level than to FLT or ELT of primary or secondary-level, the researcher intends to confine her exploration to ELT of Tertiary-level in China.The thesis starts with a brief review about the researches on teachers' contributions. Taking a longitudinal view, we will find that there have been two important approaches to the research in this aspect: the approach starting with teaching methods, popular before late 1980s, and the approach starting with teachers' principles (beliefs), popular since late 1980s. Their mutual replacement has witnessed an increasinginterest in studying teachers' internal world. But as we all know, what we can see objectively is only what a teacher is doing instead of what a teaching is thinking, and in addition, the "relationship between the two is more often than not seen as coherent in the sense that a particular principle entails certain practices-and vice versa" (Breen et al. 2001: 495). Thus, a comprehensive research on teachers' contributions should and must involve the integration of the two approaches. The marriage between the two approaches is well represented in William & Burden's social constructivism, therefore, the present writer decides to base the research on this approach to educational psychology.To lend much strength to social constructivism, the thesis firstly presents an overview of its theoretical rationales. As an alternative approach to educational psychology, social constructivism looks for its theoretical rationales mainly in psychology. With specific reference to the view of teachers' contributions, social constructivism seeks in constructivism, social interactionism and humanism as a basis. Specifically speaking, from constructivism, it borrows the constructivist view of teaching: teaching is more than passing on of a parcel of objective knowledge, but involve and attempt to share with learners what teachers themselves find personally meaningful; from social interactionism, it borrows mediation theory which points out the significance of teachers' intervention in FLL and in what ways teachers can effectively implement their intervention to help learners move into and through the zone of proximal development ; from humanism, it borrows the concept of "whole-person" education, cautioning teachers to pay equal attention to learner's affective and cognitive engagement in the learning process and to make classroom activities meaningful as experiences which involve the individual as a whole person.With a constructive integration of constructivism, social interactionism and humanism, social constructivism states its views on teachers' contributions to the teaching-learning process: te...