A Study On The Application Of Reflective Learning Strategy To English Writing Instruction In Junior Middle School

John Dewey is the first one who put forward the thought of reflection at the beginning of twentieth century and applied it to the field of education.At present,many researchers both domestic and overseas have done much research on reflection.The research can be mainly divided into two aspects,the reflective teaching and reflective learning.However,much reflective research is done on teachers' reflective teaching,and less is done on students'reflective learning.English writing is an important part,no matter in learning or teaching.But in the traditional writing class,teachers are always as center of the class,students just follow teachers' orders,without making any reflection by their own,hence they always learn without interest.Though researchers both at home and abroad have already carried out extensive empirical studies on English writing,the studies which apply the reflective learning strategy to English writing instruction are quite limited.This thesis aims to regard students as the center of English class and to study the reflection of English writing from the perspective of students,based on the theoretical basis and concept of reflective learning.The author conducts an empirical study in Changxing Island Middle School for about a term(15 weeks).This study adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods,and takes 88 students from two classes in Grade 3 as the research subjects,with one as experimental class(EC),and the other as control class(CC),in which the students' numbers are equal.These two classes are both taught by the author,while the two classes adopts different learning strategies.In EC,under the guidance and training of the author,the students use reflective learning strategy to learn English writing,while the students in CC are taught by the traditional teaching method.This study aims to explore the following four questions:1)What are the effects of reflective learning strategy on students' reflective ability?2)Does the application of reflective learning strategy to English writing affect students'learning,if it does,in what aspects?3)How does writing reflective journals influence students' reflection on writing?4)What are students' attitude towards reflective learning strategy?The author collects the data after the experiment,and the software SPSS.21.0 is used to analyze the experimental data.The results are as the following:1)After comparison of the two questionnaires,the author finds that students' reflective competence has been improved.2)After experiment,the comparison of the scores in CC and EC indicates that the reflective learning strategy has a positive role in promoting students' writing,especially in vocabulary and grammar.3)Through the analysis of student's reflective journals,it can be found that the reflective journals can promote students to reflect more in the writing process,but the result of critical reflection is not as obvious as the former.4)Through the interview,the author finds that most of students hold a positive attitude towards reflective learning strategy and would like to use it in their future study.The author puts forward the limitations of the study and suggestions for the further studies at the end of the thesis.