A Study On The Teaching Of College English Writing Based On Constructivism

As a college English teacher, I notice that college English writing plays a more and more important role under the situation of economic development in modern society during my teaching practice. However, it can not be done at one go to improve students'writing ability. Teaching of English writing has been a difficult problem to college English teachers. Many domestic scholars have done a lot of researches in order to transform the situation, but they haven't obtained satisfactory results. Most of the researches aim at optimizing the teaching method, but ignore the student-centered role. Teachers emphasize much on teaching writing knowledge instead of satisfying the students'variety of needs of creating a democratic, interactive and exploratory learning environment, which could not effectively stimulate students'learning enthusiasm or build up their confidence to write well.Constructivism, developed by Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotsky, etc. as the most influential theory in the contemporary western educational psychology, has become the guiding theory for all the countries in the world to undertake their education reforms. Constructivism advocates student-centered learning under the guidance of the teacher, which emphasizes the students'active exploration, discovery and construction of knowledge and aims at cultivating their innovative capability. It is helpful to apply to the teaching model of college English writing based on constructivism for teachers to construct an exploratory and interactional learning environment.Constructivism lays emphasis on real situation, and considers creating "real situation" as a necessary precondition of "meaning construction" and also as an important content of teaching design, and blog is an effective method to create a real situation that can support a friendly and an autonomous learning environment. The author tries to introduce blog into English writing teaching, making full use of internet, establishing blog connection with students. Meanwhile, the author adopts the method of an empirical research into different classes with the same English level to analyze the present situation of college English writing. The results from data comparison and analysis show that under the guidance of constructivism, the application of blog to the teaching of college English writing can stimulate students'interests and learning motivation, strengthen their writing enthusiasm and writing confidence, promote students'critical thinking and the effective development of cooperative learning, finally to improve students'writing competence.