Research On CLT-based Teaching Of English Writing For Art Students In Colleges

Cognitive load,put forward by John sweller in 1988,mainly studied problem solving in learning from the perspective of resource allocation.Cognitive load is best managed in such a way that cognitive processing irrelevant to learning is minimised and cognitive processing germane to learning is optimised,always within the limits of available cognitive capacity.Worked Example effect is one of an important teaching design principle based on cognitive load theory.From the perspective of cognitive load theory,this study uses the combination of worked example effect and writing teaching to improve English writing ability.In this study,46 sophomores majoring in calligraphy from Hunan University of Humanities,Science and Technology were selected as participants,including 23 students in the experimental group and 23 students in the control group.The research tools are pretest,post-test and questionnaires.The experimental group employs the instructional method of worked example.The whole experiment lasted for 10 weeks.The empirical study aims at exploring whether experimental group provided with work sample makes influence on English writing.Three questions are presented as below:1.Can instructional design based on worked sample improve students’ writing ability? If so,to what extent are they different?2.In terms of format,content and language,in which linguistic aspect does students make the most obvious improvement based on worked sample instruction?3.What are students’ perceptions on worked example writing instruction?After the experiment,the author used SPSS to analyze the writing performance and questionnaire survey.The results of the experiment reveal as follows:1.The experimental group makes significant difference on writing ability than that of the control group;2.The format and content of the experimental group were significantly higher than that of the experimental group,but there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in terms of language accuracy.3.Comparing with questionnaires,most students hold a positive attitude towards the teaching method based on cognitive load theory.The work is a small-scale experimental study.Although of limited scope,the findings provide insights into implications for teachers to make use of worked example to improve the pedagogical effects and help students reduce cognitive load.Therefore,the instructional design of English writing based on cognitive load theory improves art students’ writing proficiency,especially in the form and content.However,the accuracy of the language has not been greatly improved.Therefore,it is essential to do more research on accuracy of language.