The Inspirations Of Social Constructivism On College Spoken English Teaching

The objective of spoken English teaching is to cultivate learners' communicative competence so that learners will communicate appropriately and successfully according to the target language's rules and customs. English courses are available for every student in every college and university in China with the ultimate aim to pass CET-4 and CET-6. As spoken English was not tested until the recent two or three years in CET-4 and CET-6, it has long been ignored. The teacher-centered approach and the relatively monotonous way of the teaching of spoken English bore the students and frustrate their enthusiasm. However, the social requirement for English learners' speaking ability is continually increasing, mastery of written English is not enough. So, it is urgent for the teachers to research into the ways to improve learners' oral ability.Social constructivism learning theory is highly evaluated currently. The present thesis starts with an overview of social constructivism, as the theoretical foundation for this research, and links the theory of social constructivism to college spoken English teaching. Social constructivism suggests that knowledge is not passively received but actively builds up by the cognizing subject. Consequently, it is significant to take consideration of the learner as an individual, actively involved in constructing meaning. In the spoken English class, the students are also actively involved in making their own sense of the language inputs that surround them as well as the tasks presented to them. Thus, it is important to involve the learner in this process instead of seeing them as passive receivers of the language. The theory is proved through the statistical analysis of the questionnaire administered to the students and the scores of spoken English of two different classes. SPSS 12.0 For Windows is applied to process the data and Paired-samples T-test is used to analyze the results obtained. At last, the thesis also discusses the implications of social constructivism for College Spoken English teaching.