A Constructivist Materials System Of College English

In the field of language teaching, people have become accustomed to regular "revolutions" as one syllabus model gives way to another, or as methodological innovations supplant the practices of the past. Nonetheless, materials, as one of the key issues in a language program, seem to be under-explored. In the 1980's, materials development was treated as a sub-section of methodology, in which materials were usually introduced as examples of methods in action. It was not until the 1990's that the study of materials commenced to turn to the exploration of the principles and practices of the design, adaptation and evaluation of their own. Referring to these studies, this paper intends a relative macro perspective to explore materials development in English language teaching (ELT) for non-English majors (College English) in China, and presents the notion "materials system", emphasizing on when, why and what types of materials to be provided to learners.In order to testify the perspective, the author of this paper above all adopts the notion "materials system" to analyse the types of materials applied at different stages in College English and depicts the "current materials system (CMS)". Next, for the sake of further exploration, the author conducts an empirical study in Donghua University (Shanghai District) and Yunnan Agricultural University (Yunnan Province) by the means of questionnaires and interviews, aiming at learners' and instructors' opinions about the CMS. As a result, most learners are not much satisfied with the arrangement of materials at the different learning stages and instructors, too, express their less appreciation to it for they consider that the CMS couldn't well promote their development as well as learners' learning. In light of this, enlightened by the social constructivist approach, a review of ELT from educational psychology, the author proposes a trial materials system (TMS), in which the types of materials applied at different stages are rearranged and reinterpreted with theoretical and practical concerns.