A Survey Of Constructivism Applied To English Writing In Senior High Schools

Listening, speaking, reading, writing are four skills required in New curriculum standard. But in china, writing teaching has long been ignored. The traditional writing teaching method is teacher-centered. Topics by teachers—writing by students—correction by teachers is generally adopted in most writing class, and students find it difficult for them to make progress. Since 1980s,the humanism and constructivism have exerted profound influence on China's educational domain. This paper provides a teaching strategy based on constructivism in the teaching of writing in senior high schools, and further explanation in the teaching procedures, aiming to embodying writing process and learner-centered teaching approach. The teachers only work as facilitors, not controllers. Students interest and motivation can be enhanced by participating in the group work. Through the writing process(preparing stage, free writing stage, assessing stage), students can experience collaboration and knowledge construction. Thus their writing performance can also be enhanced.The following discoveries are made from the empirical study:active participation, exercise responsibility, group writing facilitate active learning, which contributes to improving the students'writing grades and the students trained perform better than those without training; constructivism-based approach can also be used in other aspects of teaching, such listening, speaking and reading. Students can finish meaning constructing through group work.Hopefully the findings of this thesis will be helpful to ESL teachers. The teacher should explore the proper learning environment for student to construct the meaning of the present object within their former cognitive structures to improve learning proficiency.