Teachers’ Mediation In English Writing Course For English Majors

Recently, the research in foreign language teaching and learning has shifted their attention from examining the methods of teaching to investigating the processes of learning responding to the education revolution. However, research on the process of learning stresses the process of self-construction, and ignores the research on teachers’involvement in the process. Mediation theory developed by Vygosky and Feuerstein, which belongs to Sociocultural Theory suggests that the subject of learning is not the learner itself, but an integrative whole that includes the child, the adult, and the symbolic tool provided by a given society. They think that people’s learning is mediated essentially. There are three major classes of mediator:material tools, psychological tools, and other human beings(Kozulin,1990a). Psychological tools(language, matrix) inherited by culture are the necessary tools for human beings’high mental development, whose internalization is from outside to inside, especially from more capable people’s assistance. Fuerstein thinks that teachers are mediators of learners and learning content, they select, change, amplify, and interpret objects and processes to the learners by various psychological tools to improve learning effects. The results are supposed to transcend the present learning and are aimed at training learners to deal with problems independently. Teachers’mediation theory has exciting implications for foreign language teachers.But most of the research on teachers’ mediation is non-empirical research which focuses on the speculation of the importance of teachers’mediation and operation strategy. Though there are few empirical studies, they only focus on the perception on the features of mediation theory; yes, very few exploratory qualitative research does focus on the generalization of teachers’practical mediation through natural classroom observation, but by discourse analysis. So, there still exists a lack of research which analyzes how good teachers actually perform mediation in real classroom. Thus, the thesis aims at the exploration of the mediation a teacher provides to learners in the process of instruction, and how the teacher did it.The research case is the English Writing Course for English majors of one class in grade2010in one university. The reason of choosing this case comes from two factors:(1) the importance of English Writing Course:as one compulsory course for English majors, it plays significant roles in examining learners’language application ability, analyzing ability and logical ability etc.;(2) one reflection analysis from the learners after one semester’s teaching:97.1%of learners reflected that their writing ability and thinking ability had been improved, and that this course had brought great benefit to their personal development;92.3%of the learners mentioned that the teacher’s guidance was the critical factor to improve their writing ability and personal development.Thus the thesis put forward two questions:(1) What mediation did the teacher implement in the English writing course?;(2) How did the teacher understand and implement mediation in the English writing course?Being a classroom-based case study, the author made one natural observation on the class and made a qualitative research under Grounded Theory. By constant inducing the different incidents from the data obtained from field notes, document(teacher’s published article and subject syllabus), archival records (teaching materials and learners’assignments) and interview transcriptions (four interviews with the teacher and some learners respectively) through constant comparative analysis, memoing, sorting and theoretical outline, the author gradually came to the answers to the research questions and got the findings as follows.The results show what mediation the teacher implemented as follows:(1) Teacher’s mediation in learning tasks:the teacher set significant tasks and exploited the task value to improve learners’writing ability, thinking ability; and further helped learners form a sense of competence and achieve their cognitive development;(2)Teacher’s mediation in learners’ learning:the teacher helped learners feel control of their learning and think with essential questions to become independent life-long learners and think philosophically and systematically;(3)Teacher’s mediation in learning environment:the teacher made good use of virtual learning environment(VLE) to create sharing, individualized environment and a sense of belonging of learners. The results also show how the teacher understood and implemented mediation as follows:(1)Intentionality:teaching task objectives and the English Writing Course syllabus are in accordance with the teacher’s education philosophy, which means the mediation done by the teacher is one intentional reform of the course;(2)Transcendence:the teacher utilized "writing"itself and "teacher talk" as psychological tools to render objectives of teaching to transcend the mere linguistic purpose.The last part of the thesis points out the limitations:it would have been more persuasive and typical if the author had observed the class in a longer period with video and recorder.