A Case Study Of Application Of Constructivism In The Instruction Of Business English Letter Writing

Business English letter writing module as a practical and useful English writing course has been taught at the author's university for a decade or so. Constructivist learning theory is being tried in the teaching of the business English letter writing course.The center of this learning theory is to make all the students construct their own knowledge through their own experience and on the basis of their previous knowledge,with the help of their teacher.This paper presents an empirical study of the business English letter writing course for postgraduate students at the university.In the course of teaching of business English letter writing,constructivist theory has been applied in order to achieve a satisfactory learning result.The author intends to analyze the students' learning states of this course under the constructivist learning environment created by the teacher,in order to explore how valuable and acceptable this new type of teaching is,which emphasizes learning through experience,the most important element in the learning process of this course.In class,the teacher makes efforts to supply the students with the most important information and knowledge about business letter writing through audios, videos and other recourse from different sources.Other ways are also introduced to help students in constructing their own knowledge such as questions for discussion on writing formats,writing principles,writing contexts and language features of the business letters,as well as exercises and assignments in and after class.The author adopts a quantitative and qualitative study of the business letter writing course,by using SPSS 14.0 software to analysis the data which has been collected from the students' questionnaires,and summarizing the interviews with both students and the teacher at the end of the writing course.Analysis of the students' learning results is illustrated in order to discuss the problems in the learning process of this course.At the same time how well the constructivist learning theory is applied among these students in the learning process of this course is concluded based on the analysis of the results of the case study.At the end of this paper,the author induces some findings based on the process of analysis according to the scope of this research...