A Study On English Teaching And Learning In High School From The Perspective Of Constructivism

Since the late 80s, the influence of constructivism has quickly reached many fields. It has especially brought strong and deep influence to pedagogical field, so it is called"a revolution in the pedagogical psychology".Since its spread into China, constructivism has brought great changes to educational field. Ministry of Education published General High School English Curriculum Standards (Experimental Version) under the guidance of constructivism in 2003 and a new round of high school English curriculum reform started. Now, eight years have passed, there should have an increasing presence of constructivist practices in high school English class. In order to find out the status of the application of constructivism in high school English class, the author conducted the study. The instrument was a 5-point Likert questionnaire which was originally developed by Tenenbaum et al. in 2001 and revised by the author according to the features of English class. The participants were 76 freshmen studying in Lantian Vocational and Technical Institute of Jiangxi. The quantitative study showed that constructivist practices were somewhat presented in high school English classrooms. In order to find out the factors which hindered the application of constructivist instructions in high school English class, the author made studies on high school English teachers and students. The questionnaire of teachers'ability included 28 questions while the questionnaire of students'learning habits included 23 5-point Likert questions. The results showed that limited knowledge level, low reflective teaching ability and little attention to students'development hindered high school English teachers from becoming constructivist instructors while lack of autonomy, low cooperative learning ability and reflective ability prevented students from becoming constructivist learners. The study implied that in order to enable constructivism to be applied more in high school English teaching and learning, high school English teachers should be life-long learners, active practitioners of reflective teaching and witnesses of students'development, and students should be autonomous, cooperative and reflective learners.