| The development of Xinjiang cannot be completed without the support of a reservoir of local talents of ethnic minorities. In South Xinjiang, where Uygur people account for most of the population, the education of Uygur college students is the key to the regional development. However, due to the lack of an English-language environment, isolated geographical position and outdated teaching models, the quality of Uyghur English majors there is less than satisfactory. With these in mind, the author tries to apply constructivist theory to the Uyghur English majors in order to find out its effectiveness.The constructivist theory provides a new perspective for teaching English to Uygur English majors as the theory advocates student-centered teaching models that emphasizes the students’ active exploration, collaborative learning and construction of real-life learning environment in order to promote the construction of knowledge through the collaboration among learners.After a survey of relevant studies, the author found plenty of researches on constructivism and learned that the theory had been widely regarded as the leading education philosophy in foreign language teaching. However, empirical studies on the combination of constructivism and teaching English to Uygur English majors are relatively rare. Hence, in this paper, the author will apply the approach to the English teaching of Uygur English majors and study its effect. The key questions to be answered by the experiment are:1) Can constructivism-based English teaching model effectively improve Uyghur English majors’ achievement?2) Can constructivism-based English teaching model increase Uyghur English majors’interest in English learning?The paper is based on a one-semester (16 weeks) experiment involving Class 10-3 and Class 10-5 of the foreign language department of Kashgar Teachers’College, with the same textbook but different teaching models, i.e. Traditional model is used for Class 10-5 (the control group) while constructivism-based teaching model is used for Class 10-3 (the experimental group). The experiment adopts quantitative research methods mainly. With test papers as experimental tool, the author evaluated the two classes with a pretest at the beginning of the semester and a posttest at the end, then collected and analyzed the data with the aid of SPSS 16.0.As the research shows, after a semester of teaching experiment, students in the experimental class ended up with noticeably higher scores than those in the control class. The results indicated that the students in both classes, to some extent, made progress under the same condition (except different teaching methods), however, the students of EC performed better in the test than those of CC. The results of the interview also indicate constructivism-based teaching model is popular in the experimental class and most students in the experimental class become increasingly interested in it. These prove that the application of constructivist theory has actual effect on English learning of Uygur English majors.Based on the theoretical framework of constructivism, this research provides a brand new perspective for English teaching to Uygur English majors:it not only further enhances the English study, but also offers significant reference to other ethnic minorities’English teaching. However, due to the scarcity of empirical studies on the combination of constructivist theory and teaching English to Uygur English majors, this research will inevitably require more data obtained from practice for perfection. |
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