An Empirical Study On The Constructivist Teacher Intervention In College English Vocabulary Teaching

At present, the teaching of English in China is confronted with contradictory teachingbeliefs and practices. Facilitated by multi-media devices, some English teachers maintainthe “spoon-feeding” style of traditional teacher intervention in the form of rule explanation,pattern drills and error correction, which is built upon the structural view and the learningtheory of behaviorism. Conversely, under the influence of constructivism, other Englishteachers try to break away from traditional notions of teacher intervention and heavilyemphasize learner-centeredness in the classroom. It grants students so much freedom to dofree talk that it is dubbed as “laissez-faire”. Meanwhile, many researchers and teachingpractitioners seem to take an “all-or-nothing” attitude towards either “spoon-feed” studentsor “laissez-faire” style.The paper presents the constructivist view of teacher intervention which combines thetwo styles above in English vocabulary teaching class. The proposed study focuses on thefollowing questions: First, what are their general strategies and attitudes of the testedstudents in vocabulary learning before the experiment and how about their changes afterthe experiment? Second, do the students have obvious improvement in the final vocabularytest with the constructivist teacher intervention in vocabulary teaching? Third, does theconstructivist teacher intervention mode match students’ expectations?This project is an experimental research. It was a combination of quantitative analysisand qualitative study to process the data which was collected through questionnaire,pre-test, post-test and interview. The subjects chosen for the experiment are two classesaltogether amounting to59non-English major freshmen from Arts and Science College ofBohai University. During the experiment, one class is treated as the experimental class,which is taught under the constructivist teacher intervention mode, whereas the other one istreated as the control group, which is taught by traditional teacher intervention mode. Theteaching program lasted for one term during which students finish questionnaires, pre-testand post-test. The data of the test is analyzed by software SPSS. In order to understandstudents’ suggestions and thoughts of the theory, the author chooses6students of theexperimental class randomly to do the interview.The results of this research demonstrate that the tested students generally reckon thatvocabulary is too hard to remember and they seldom use the vocabulary memory strategies;thus, the author takes the constructivist view of teacher intervention in the vocabularyteaching in the experimental class, and the statistic results of their scores calculated by SPSS show that experimental class performs better than controlled class and there existssignificant difference between them; in the experimental class, most students are in favorof this constructivist teacher intervention teaching mode.The present project made use of an experimental research to improve the teachingpractice of English vocabulary. The research has both theoretical and practical values. Inone hand, it lends theoretical support to the field of English vocabulary teaching innovationfor non-English majors in China. In the other hand, it provides a new model for Englishvocabulary teaching innovation, and at the mean time the reliability of the new model hasbeen tested by the research.