A Study Of English Instructional Design In Junior High School Based On Constructivism

The traditional teacher-centered teaching mode can not meet the requirements of Englishteaching based on the reform of new curriculum. Confronting the educational reform,constructivists put forward a series of new ideas about teaching and learning, which arewidely concerned in the field of education. However, many researches just stop at thetheoretical level; they do not come into the practice level.This thesis attempts to explore a new English instructional method for the junior highschool by the application of constructivist theory in English classroom instruction. The author,taking120students in Class1and Class2of Grade Nine as the subjects, did an experiment inXindian Middle School. The two classes were divided into the experiment class and thecontrol class. In the control class, the teacher still used the traditional methods, while the newapproach, namely, the instructional design based on constructivism was used in theexperiment class. There are a variety of constructivism instructional methods, such asscaffolding instruction, anchored instruction, inquiry-based learning, cooperative learning, etc.According to the students’ situation of English learning in the research, the author chosescaffolding instruction and cooperative learning as the two main instructional designs. Thetwo classes both employed the pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire in the three months’experiment. The purpose of pre-questionnaire was to gain the information about the students’situation of English learning in the traditional English classroom. The post-questionnaire wasto prove whether instructional design taken in this experiment was beneficial for improvingthe students’ English learning. The results of the pre-questionnaire revealed that theconsciousness of students’ autonomous learning and cooperative learning is low in the twoclasses at the beginning. Through the analysis of the post-questionnaire, the author found that the experiment class improved more obviously on the consciousness of autonomous andcooperative learning, compared with the control class.The thesis falls into six parts. Chapter one is the introduction, which presents theresearch background, the significance of the study and the organization of the thesis. Chaptertwo is the literature review relevant to instructional design and constructivism. Chapter threemainly refers to the theoretical framework of the thesis, which introduces scaffoldinginstruction and cooperative learning. Chapter Four provides an overview of the researchdesign and the process. Research objectives, subjects of this research, instruments used in thisresearch and process for data collection are also described in this chapter. Based on theresearch results, Chapter Five is the analysis and discussion. The last chapter is the conclusionof the whole research, which points out the major findings, limitations and suggestions forfurther study.