The Knowledge Construction Process Of “learning By Teaching” Approach Applied To English Majors’ Reading Teaching

Reading, as one of the most basic skills and significant input sources for English majors, stays as both teaching key points and difficult points. The method of reading teaching has experienced prominent reforms, from focusing on vocabulary and language points, requiring the students to imitate, translate and mechanically repeat to the widely accepted reading teaching under the direction of schema theory, and to the modern diverse reading teaching. However, the effect is still far from satisfactory. The present study tries to apply “learning by teaching” approach(LdL approach) which is quite popularized in foreign counties into the reading teaching of English majors in China. That is to enable the students to learn by preparing and teaching lessons just as the teacher.Compared with the long-adopted pattern of “the students listen to what the teacher teaches”, “learning by teaching” approach is more demanding to the students. Meanwhile, the students can have a better understanding of the knowledge. However, this thesis is not to testify the effectiveness of this approach, but to study the students’ learning process under this approach by revising Gass’(2008) model of second language acquisition and during the process, research the embodiments of the elements in “i+1” and ZPD and on the basis of that, discuss the relationship between “i+1” and “ZPD”. Although Gass’ model of second language acquisition has gained a lot of support after repeated quotation, it would be too general to explain the knowledge construction process of the students in LdL approach if it is used without any adaptation. Concerning this, this thesis establishes a new knowledge construction model of LdL approach by combining the theoretical basis of LdL approach and the characteristics of this approach with Gass’ model.This thesis adopts a qualitative research to study the students’ learning process and the relationship between “i+1” and “ZPD”. Fifteen English majors who are sophomores from Sichuan International Studies University are chosen as the subjects and they are divided into five groups. At the same time, the teaching content is divided into five tasks, namely background knowledge, new words, the text, figures of speech and exercises and randomly assigned to the five groups. Then each group prepares and teaches the part of their task and carefully records the detailed preparation process while the researcher does the classroom observation and analyzes the results. As it would be too loose and superficial if the performance of each group is analyzed, this thesis concentrates on analyzing one group, namely the group responsible for the text to study the research questions put forward by this study.Through the experiment and analysis, the present study indicates:(1) the newly formed knowledge construction model of LdL approach can effectively explain the students’ learning process under this approach;(2) the elements of “i+1” and ZPD, namely “i”, “i+1”, “actual level” and “potential level” can be embodied in the process;(3) based on these embodiments, research on the relationship between “i+1” and ZPD shows that the two are complementary, explaining knowledge acquisition from the internal and external aspects respectively.