Research And Application Of Constructivism-based Reading Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Reading plays an important role in language learning. It is an essential channel forstudents to acquire knowledge and communicate with others. Reading is also an indispensablestep of language input. In recent years, the vocational education has been prospering.However, the traditional teacher-centered teaching model dominates the class in vocationalcolleges, especially in teaching English reading. The traditional teaching model impedes thestudents’ interest and initiative in language learning. The unsatisfactory effects of Englishreading teaching result in more and more advocates for English reading instruction reform.Constructivism is one of the important branches of cognitive theory. According toconstructivism, the nature of learning is that the students actively make their own meaningconstruction under a certain circumstance. During the process, communication andcooperation are of great importance. There are three mature constructivism-based instructions:scaffolding instruction, anchored instruction and random access instruction. A lot of scholarsand researchers have made theoretical study on the application of constructivism to Englishreading teaching. In addition, some researchers and teachers have attempted to applyconstructivist theory to practice. However, it is found that, despite those theoretical papers andsome constructivism-based reading teaching designs, empirical studies on the application ofconstructivism to English reading teaching in vocational colleges have seldom beenconducted. Therefore, the thesis empirically researched on the reading teaching in vocationalcolleges under constructivism-based teaching models and explored whetherconstructivism-based instruction can improve the students’ reading ability.During the research, a constructivism-based reading teaching model was proposed and acorresponding experiment was carried out. The experiment lasted for a semester. The subjectsof the experiment came from two parallel classes in a vocational college. The experiment class was taught with new constructivism-based reading instructional model, while the controlclass was taught with traditional teaching method. In the study, pretest and posttest as well asinterviews were employed. Both the experiment class and control class received the pre-testand post-test; the results were analyzed with SPSS. At the end of the semester, an interviewwas conducted to the students. The results demonstrate that constructivism-based readinginstruction can improve the students’ performance in English reading comprehension than thetraditional method, arouse the students’ interest in reading learning, add to their activenessand initiative in teaching activities, and cultivate their cooperative and communicativeabilities. It is expected that this study can shed some light on the reading teaching in thevocational colleges.