An Application Of Constructivism To English Reflective Writing Teaching In Senior Middle School

As a medium of communication, writing in English learning is of great importance and is irreplaceable.(Ding, 1999) NMET Syllabus proposes that candidates should have the ability of writing a short essay of no less than 100 words in NMET within half an hour. However, there are many problems in the writing teaching and learning. With the traditional teaching method, writing in most senior middle schools is like"teachers dominating, and students listening."Traditional teaching methods cannot meet modern education demands. The teaching situation calls for the teaching reform.The thesis is aiming at developing a reflective writing teaching approach to establish an equal teaching process where teachers learn how to teach and students learn how to learn. In this thesis, the writer takes the reflective teaching guided by constructivism as the guiding theory. And constructivism is the theoretical base of reflective teaching. As a philosophy of learning, it holds that knowledge is not passively received but built up by the cognizing subject and learning is active construction based on prior knowledge. Under the guidance of constructivism, this thesis intends to judge if English reflective writing teaching approach can improve students'writing ability in senior middle school.To put reflective writing teaching into practice, an empirical study is designed and carried out in two classes chosen randomly from Senior One in Gaocheng No. 1 Middle School of Hebei. Traditional methods are actualized in one class while reflective writing teaching under the guidance of constructivism is conducted in the other during the 20-week experiment. The teaching procedures, including activities and tasks, are completely different in these two classes. Compared with the traditional transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the students, English reflective writing teaching under the guidance of constructivism focuses on giving the students center stage in the classroom by providing them with environments and opportunities, which cultivates their self-awareness and makes their writing learning a more active process of knowledge cognition.At the beginning of the experiment a questionnaire is administered in both classes to make an investigation about the students'writing learning. Besides, a pretest and posttest of writing are held to survey if the experiment is beneficial to their writing improvement. After the experiment, all the data collected is analyzed. The results show that English reflective writing teaching under the guidance of constructivism contributes to cultivating students'self-awareness of knowledge construction in the process of writing learning and improve their writing performance, from which it can be concluded that English reflective writing teaching under the guidance of constructivism has positive effects on students'writing learning, that is to say, it can improve students'writing ability.