Study On The Application Of Constructivism In College English Listening Teaching

Listening comprehension is one of the basic skills in mastering language, and it is also an important form of language activity. In recent years, listening comprehension has been becoming a focus of foreign language teaching in China. At the same time, listening teaching is one of the difficulties in college English teaching. At present, there are many problems in the practical listening class:listening course takes up only a small portion of time in the curriculum, the listening input is rather inadequate, the teaching methods in classroom are monotonous and the listening teaching model is old. As a result of that, the listening ability of students is rather weak. To solve these problems, many experts do a lot of research in this field. Many experts have tried to introduce advanced scientific technology---computer to listening teaching. And some experts have tried to use advanced teaching theory--constructivism in English teaching in class.Constructivism is a branch of cognitive psychology. One of important concepts in constructivism is schema, which refers to the individual's perception and understanding of the world and way of thinking and also can be seen as a framework of mental activity or organization structure. Schema is the starting point and the core of cognitive structure, or the basis for human understanding. Therefore, schema formation and change is the essence of cognitive development which is influenced by three processes:accommodation, assimilation and equivalence. Teaching can not ignore the learners'existing knowledge and experience or simply "cram" knowledge from the outside into the learners'heads, but should take existing knowledge and experience of the learner as a growing point of new knowledge to guide the learner to grow new knowledge and experience from the original knowledge and experience. The idea is consistent with Vygotsky "zone of proximal development". Teachers are neither the presenter of the knowledge, nor a symbol of authentic knowledge. Teaching is not the transmission of knowledge, but the processing and conversion of knowledge and should be processed under the guidance of teachers and take learners as a center with emphasis on the role of the learner, without ignoring the leading role of teachers. The role of teachers is transmitted from the traditional authority to a students'senior partner or cooperator. Teachers are helpers and facilitators of meaning construction rather than knowledge providers. In short, teachers are the guider of teaching by shifting the responsibility of monitoring and ultimately enable students to achieve independent learning.Besides, constructivism advocates situational teaching. Knowledge is acquired through the construction of meaning in certain contexts with the help of others, such as the collaboration between people, communication, making use of the necessary information, etc. Ideal learning environment should include the context, collaboration, communication and meaning construction. Situational learning must be conducive to learners'construction of meaning on what they learn. In teaching design, creating a context conducive to learners' meaning construction is the most important part. Collaboration should be run through the entire process, that is, the collaboration between teachers and students and collaboration among students. Since the meanings are not entirely independent but from our meaning building and everyone understands things in their own way, teaching is supposed to promote cooperation among students so that students can see the basis of different points of view. Therefore, cooperative learning is widely focused by the constructivist. There is no only standard of understanding for learners to construct their own ways of understanding for things, so learners'understanding become more rich and universal through the cooperation between them. Communication is the most basic in collaborative process. In fact, the collaborative learning process is the communication process. In this process, each learner's idea is shared by the entire learning community. Each exchange for promoting the learning process is essential to meaning construction, which is the ultimate goal of teaching activities and the ultimate goal of everything around it. Cognitive constructivism and social constructivism are introduced in this essay as the two major strands of constructivist learning theory. They basically share the same perspective on learning:learning is a knowledge construction process in which learners play the central role; learners construct knowledge through active interaction with the outside world based on their prior knowledge. However, different emphasis has been made like:the former stresses the learning process while the latter concentrates on social factors. Students construct knowledge through interaction with the teacher, the learning materials and other students. As these interactions are highly facilitated by the teacher's mediation efforts, the student-teacher interaction plays a significant role in students' knowledge construction process. In addition, teaching should make the learning situation as the real occurrence of similar situations to solve the students'real-life problems encountered, so it should select the authentic task as the content of this learning task without making it too simplistic or far away from the reality of the problem situation.This thesis presents an in-depth insight into the approaches that teachers can adopt to boost the multidimensional interaction to stimulate students'learning. What's more, it is advocated by the author that the teacher should get a holistic understanding of students'learning process and focus sufficiently on cognitive factors such as motivation, emotion, individual differences, which are highlighted in cognitive constructivism. Therefore, through combination of the two major strands, the author is aiming at exploring a scaffolding approach involving interactive factors that greatly facilitates students'learning. It is anticipated that this thesis will be of practical importance to its readers.The author decides to establish a class teaching pattern of college English listening based on constructivism theory in multimedia classroom environment, and that is the research purpose of this thesis. A research based on this purpose answers the following questions:1) Is the constructivist listening teaching pattern feasible and effective under the current educational system? 2) Is the constructivist listening teaching pattern more effective than the traditional one? 3) What's the effectiveness of traditional listening teaching pattern on improving listening ability?The author takes two classes of 2009 non-English major as the samples, whose average scores are almost the same in the middle level. One of the classes was selected as the experimental class, and the other as the control class. The experimental class was being instructed under the guidance of constructivist teaching. After ten weeks of teaching, two classes'listening was examined again. It was found that the experimental class under the guidance of the constructivism improved significantly with the performance much better than the control class. Within the experimental class, the pleasant results are not only showed on class average score but also on the distribution of different achievers. In addition, a survey were conducted before and after the test to understand the students opinions on listening learning, including whether they are interested in listening, whether they like the listening approach, whether they like atmosphere in listening class, etc. The results display that the experimental class on the second test apparently shows their recognition for the listening class, but no obvious change in the control class. It is proved that students'motivation, emotion and other factors not only effectively improve the teaching effect, but also make the students enjoy learning, love learning and self-learning better. Based on ten weeks'teaching experience, combined with the two branches of constructivism, the author proposed the specific application of constructivist theory in College English listening teaching. It should be noted that the specific teaching method according to the two branches can not be strictly divided, not a single isolated use of each method, but an integrated use with combination of different subjects and contents.In short, the constructivist theory of content is very multi-dimensional, but the core can be summarized in one sentence:taking student as the center with emphasizing the active exploration of knowledge and students taking the initiative on the discovery of knowledge significance (unlike the traditional teaching which teachers sent the knowledge from the minds to the student notebook.). To student-centered, the emphasis is "learning"; to teacher-centered, the emphasis is "to teaching". This is the most fundamental difference of two kinds of education. As constructivist learning environment requires the latest information and technological support, which makes the constructivist theory combine with teaching practice, thus it becomes the guiding ideology of teaching reform in domestic and foreign schools.