Application Of Social Constructivism To The Reading Teaching In Senior Middle School

Reading is not only one of the four important skills the students must master in the senior middle school, but also an essential way for people to get information and knowledge, to know the world, to take pleasure and to communicate. Therefore, reading is a subject drawing many attentions of scholars at home and abroad, most of which are paid to the teaching methods of reading. Speaking of reading teaching, the reading teaching is a theme for study and debate. We should reform the traditional method– that the teachers are put in the central position, while the students are the passive receivers. The teachers paid more attention to the language points, vocabulary and grammars. The students are lacking in enough chances to do the actual reading activities, which leads to an unsatisfying situation.According to the new learning theory, the process of learning is an active, interactive and complex one, while not a passive one. The learners are active meaning constructors. Thus, reading is also an active, interactive and complex process, during which readers not only interact with the printed words but also with the writers. This is similar to the theory of constructivism. In the view of constructivists, learning is an active, interactive process. The learners are active reconstructors. They acquire knowledge with the help of teachers, their peers and other information resources. Teachers are not dominators, but facilitators, organizer, advisors and so on. Constructivism believes that knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject (Glaserfeld, 1994:162). Social constructivism also holds the same view, but it pays more attention to learning contexts. In the learning process, learners obtain knowledge in certain contexts with the help of teachers, and consolidate the new knowledge by interactions with a variety of tasks. Therefore, learners, teachers, contexts and tasks are the four major factors in the learning process.If we want to reform the cramming method of teaching and to improve the students'reading abilities, we should combine the four factors and activate the students, improve the scientific quality of teaching model, and what's more important, the teachers should learn more advanced teaching and learning theories to better understand the concept of effective teaching and learning, which can arouse the learners'learning interest and motivation. Based on the theory of Social Constructivism, the writer put forwards some principles about how to plan a reading lesson. Because the writer thinks that planning a reading lesson is the fundamental and essential step to make efforts to improve the effect of English reading. According to the theory framework, the writer shows the two samples of reading classes: an intensive reading class and an extensive reading class, to discuss the factors that should be considered when planning a lesson for a reading class. The writer designed a new teaching reading lesson, based on the framework of Social Constructivism, which the writer thinks it is useful for the teachers to improve the effect of English reading. And then the writer carried out an experiment according to the teaching plans to test the effect of social constructivism theory on improving the reading ability of senior school students. There are two classes in the experiment, the control one and the experiment one, each of 50 subjects. Based on the result of the experiment, thought it is not very satisfying and it is not obvious that the scores of the previous two texts of the experiment class are better than those of the control class; it tends to be on the positive trend. And we can get a result that the score of the last text of the experiment class is obviously better than that of the control class. Therefore, it can be said that it confirms it is feasible to apply the theory of social constructivism to the reading teaching. Of course, there are some limits in the experiment. For example, the period is very short, which makes the result not as satisfying as the writer expects. I think that it is helpful for the teachers to reform their teaching methods and useful for the learners to raise their levels of reading.