Activity Theory-based Blended Learning In College English Writing: An Experimental Study

With drastic advancement of technology and Internet,informatization has become a national strategy,therefore,educational informatization is ushering a great historic development opportunity.The 13 th Five-Year Plan for Educational Informatization issued by Ministry of Education points out that we will construct an educational system of network,digitization,personalization and lifelong procedure,promoting online and offline blended learning in higher education.Therefore,blended learning,which combines face-to-face instruction and online learning,is the tendency of higher education reform.As an important part in College English learning,English writing is a language output form reflecting comprehensive level of English.However,from previous studies,learners' need of English writing cannot be met in present traditional classroom learning,while blended learning method can preferably solve the problem(Wang Yi,2011).Meanwhile,activity theory put forward by Vygotsky,focusing on active interaction between teacher and students to meet needs of students,can provide theoretical guidance for blended learning mode(Huang Dawang & Yang Wei,2010).Therefore,the author designed a blended learning model in English writing,which aimed at exploring the impacts on college students' English writing performance.The following are specific research questions:1)Is there any impact of blended learning model on college students' English writing performance? If yes,what are they?2)Is there any difference among impacts of blended learning model on different level students' writing performance? If yes,in what aspects?3)What are the reasons for these differences?This study designed an activity theory-based blended learning model which took microblog-Sina Weibo as an online learning platform to conduct a 14-week English writing experiment.85 freshmen in two parallel classes were from a university of science and engineering as participants.Writing pretest and post-test were carried out at the beginning and the end of the semester respectively.Combining with writing topic of every unit,experimental students needed to keep reflective diary to record their learning experiences.Besides,the researcher purposefully selected 6 students from different level to conduct a semi-structure interview.These three instruments form triangulation.Major findings of this research are as follows:1)Blended learning model based on activity theory has a positive impact on college students' English writing performance.Compared with control group,except vocabulary,experimental group's scores of content,organization,grammar and mechanics are significantly enhanced.2)There are differences among impacts of blended learning model on different level students' English writing performance.Writing performance of three groups was enhanced but with different degree.Low-level students improved most in all five dimensions;mid-level students improved a lot also in five dimensions;while high-level students improved least,mainly in content and organization.3)Experimental students in low-level and mid-level groups improved all five dimensions,because they got more involved in collaborative learning and autonomous learning.Students in high-level group improved least,especially in grammar,mechanics and vocabulary.On the one hand,because they had good command of grammar and mechanics,thus there is little room for improvement in limited time;on the other hand,they misused advanced words,so there is inconspicuous improvement on vocabulary.Because of variance of one's writing proficiency,different time and efforts spent by learners,as well as learners' changed attitudes towards writing,these all cause different impacts of blended learning on different-level students' writing.As a whole,blended learning contributes to students' writing performance,especially in autonomous learning and collaborative learning.It can provide reference for further researches on college English writing.