The Study Of Learning Through Experience Based Tacit Epistemology

The dissertation probes into the split phenomenon in English learning and teacher education through analyzing Polanyi's tacit epistemology systemically. It attempts to understand the structure and dynamics of knowledge from the awareness dimension, the activity dimension and cognitive dimension, portrays the crucial role of the body and intuition in cognitive activities. Finally on the basis of reconstructing English language knowledge and practical knowledge of teacher, implications has been shed light on the supposed gap between theoretic knowledge and practical activity that learning through experience is a real route to overcome the gap.The thesis is classified as nine chapters and composed of four parts: The first part attempts to seek the basis of modern thought and postmodern thought in Polanyi' tacit epistemology. The second part is about the structure and dynamics of knowledge. The third part is involved in personal language and personal learning. The last part is concerned with implications of tacit epistemology to English learning and teacher education.Polanyi's tacit epistemology is on the basis of criticism to modern thoughts to which Rene Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant lay a foundation. Polanyi seeks to criticize and overcome the modernist presuppositions. Polanyi' post-critical philosophy is a postmodern one, but its specific version of postmodernism differs from deconstruction in nature and can be called reconstruction.Tacit knowledge is the foundation of Polanyi' tacit epistemology, and its logic starting point. The study of tacit knowledge can be traced back to ancient Greece philosophy and Chinese philosophy more than two-thousand years ago, but Polanyi studied tacit knowledge systemically as a epistemological topic, who is a famous English physical chemist, sociologist and philosopher with a Hungarian origin. He puts forward the concept of tacit knowledge firstly, illustrates the priority of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, and uses the two awareness theory to explain it.The article analyzes construction and dynamics of tacit knowledge through awareness dimension, activity dimension and cognitive dimension, and insists on the continuity between subsidiary awareness and focal awareness, body and concept, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, and tacit knowing and explicit knowing. Body is a real starting point of cognitive activities, and the interaction berween bodily activity and subsidiary awareness gives rise to tacit knowing and knowledge which provides basis to...