English Writing Teaching Of Senior High School Based On The Theory Of Constructivism

According to the English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School, teachersshould pay attention to cultivating students’ comprehensive language ability in Englishteaching of senior high school, and the writing ability is an important part. Writing takesup about one sixth of the total scores in all kinds of English tests in senior high school.Thus, English writing teaching should not be neglected. However, a survey shows thatalthough teachers and students can realize the importance of English writing in seniorhigh schools, English writing teaching, which focuses on students’ ability to pass thecollege entrance examination, is usually done before the exam as a form of assaulttraining and fails to give students systematic knowledge of writing. This paper attemptsto explore the effective way of English writing teaching based on the theory ofconstructivism through the writing experiment among students of Grade One inLuoyang NO.1senior high school.First, this study introduces the constructivism theory, which treats students as thecenter of learning. The core ideas of constructivism are summarized as follows:(1)Knowledge is constructed actively by students, and learning is not a passive process ofabsorption but an active exploration of knowledge;(2) Learners must construct a newcognitive structure based on their own previous experience instead of discovering theoutside knowledge independent from their minds;(3) The learning environment, such as“situation’’,“cooperation”,“conversation”, plays an important part in students’construction of knowledge.Then, this paper analyzes the traditional English writing teaching methods in seniorhigh school and the existing problems. After that, this study puts forward the Englishwriting teaching strategies based on constructivism: creating the situation-givingrequirements-independent thinking-group discussion-independent writing-mutualcooperating-correcting and assessment-reflection of the learning. The experimentconsists of three stages:(1) Pre-test and questionnaires. In order to find out students’present writing ability and their attitude in English writing, this study worked out the students’ scores of the writing part in their first monthly examination as theirperformance in the pretest. The purpose is to see whether the examinees have the samewriting level before the teaching experiment. At the same time questionnaires are alsogiven to find out whether students are interested in English writing;(2) Teachingexperiment. This study chose two natural classes of the same English level class9andclass10of Grade One as the experimental class and control class respectively, andtaught the experimental class with the teaching strategies based on constructivismtheory and the control class with the traditional method as usual;(3) Post-test,questionnaires and interviews. To see whether the teaching experiment is effective, apost test is given to find out the changes of students’ writing scores at the end of thisterm. Besides, questionnaires and interviews are also given to see whether students’attitude towards writing has changed after the teaching experiment.The findings can be summarized as follows:(1) Constructivism in English writingteaching can improve students’ writing ability, which can be seen from the fact that theperformance of the experimental class is much better than the control class;(2)Application of constructivism theory in English writing teaching can help to stimulatestudents’ interests of writing;(3) The group cooperative learning under the guidance ofconstructivism theory can help to develop senior high school students’ communicativeand thinking competence.In the end, this paper points out the limitations of the research and give suggestionsfor both teachers and students: in order to stimulate students’ interests of writing,teachers should prepare for creating situations before the class and making full use ofresources, such as the internet and textbooks. At the same time, students should learn toexplore independently and cooperate with others actively.