| Within the traditional cognitive framework, writing is regarded as a non-linear,exploratory and generative process whereby learners discover and reformulate their ideas asthey attempt to approximate meaning, and during writing, writers use strategies such asplanning, translating, reviewing, monitoring, generating ideas, organizing, goal-setting,evaluating, and revising. However, the cognitive paradigm is too narrow in the understandingof context and is eclipsed by studies that emphasize social, historical and political contexts ofwriting. Writing is deeply laminated by the dispersed, fluid chains of writing places, time,people, and artifacts. Sociocultural theory (SCT) proposes that higher mental processes beconsidered as functions of mediated activity. The social milieu of language learning serves asthe source of cognitive and affective development and does not merely provide a context inwhich individual learning takes place. Mind emerges through interactions with others andenvironment, mediated by artifacts, signs, and language. This study explores English writinglearning within the activity theory framework, which is a sub-field of SCT. Activity theory is aform of sociocultural analysis that takes activity system as the unit of analysis, rather than theisolated component of one activity. An activity system, composed of six elements, is system ofany ongoing, object-directed, historically conditioned, dialectically structured, and tool-mediated human interactions.This study seeks to apply activity theory, especially the activity system model and itsconcept of mediation to the study of writing course. It seeks to find out the mediation onlearners in the writing class and its effect on outcomes. The subjects who volunteered to takepart in this study are29sophomores majoring in English in Shandong Agricultural University.The context of the current study is on a network-based writing platform through which theteacher and students, students and their peers can interact with each other. After taking thewriting class for a semester, learners’ reflections of the semester were submitted to the net andthen collected as research data.After analyzing the dynamics of the writing class from the activity system model in greatdetail, the data about mediation and outcomes were treated with grounded theory includingfour stages of codes, concepts, categorization and theory.The results show that there are three kinds of mediations to learners, namely, materialmediation, psychological mediation and the mediation from human mediators. Materialmediation mainly refers to the network-based writing system; psychological mediation refersto three literature works learners were asked to read in class. The mediation from human mediators comes from two ways: teachers’ mediation in terms of guides, lectures, teachingmethod and feedback; peers’ mediation by review and collaborative activities in community.Mediations from various sources have multiple effects on outcomes of the activity system,although the primary object is to improve writing skills. The analysis of outcomesdemonstrates that learners have improved their writing ability, become happier, more positiveand confident. They also have new insights upon life and friendship.All these findings pointed to the effectiveness of Activity System model as a usefulframework for analyzing and theorizing foreign language teaching. Compared with traditionalteaching environment, the network-based writing system mediated learners’ writing process inmore abundant ways, such as peer mediation. Under such kind of environment, abundance ofmediation led to various unexpected outcomess besides improvement in writing skills. As aresult, some suggestions were put forward for ESL teaching in China. Firstly, teachers canemploy computer skillfully and build a unique platform that is suitable for the teachingpractice. Secondly, activity theory framework can be used as a tool for teachers to design andexamine the instruction comprehensively. |
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