Social Constructionism and Learning Strategies: An Alternative Approach in English Education

1. Social ConstrutXnism and Learning Strategies An Alternative Approach for practical purpose Derek Ying Liu (刘鹰)

2. Constructionist in China? • A fashionable and popular perspective in certain circles • Post modern flavor • Relativists view • Anti-science • In English education • New Curriculum Standard • Based a lot on constructionist views or assumptions/hypnoses • Task based learning • Instructional design

3. Confusion and Chinese construction • A lot of confusion, objection and debate • But it is also chinesely constructed process • The issues is not the authenticity but how it is constructed in Chinese way and for a Chinese purpose • No final judgment offered

4. Today’s construction • Presentation • What’s in the name? • Any real meat in there at all? • Any relevance with ELT or TESOL in China? • How about learning strategies? • Self directed, designed and monitor? • Find your own learning strategies • Interaction • Questions and answers • Construction • ? how

5. The name of a rose? • Social whatnism? • Constructionism or constructivism ? • 社会建构主义（social constructivism）和社会建构 论（social constructionism） • In the name of?

6. Does it Matter? • No • It is only a label • Constructed • Yes • Micro, psychological • Macro, social • That is all

7. What is it anyway? • The constructionist • No unified theory • No unified assumptions/hypnoses • Few if any experimental support

8. Five basic themes of constructivism • active agency • Order • Self • social-symbolic relatedness • lifespan development.

9. A brief explanation • human experiencing involves continuous active agency. This distinguishes constructivism from forms of determinism that cast humans as passive pawns in the play of larger forces. • much human activity is devoted to ordering processes – the organizational patterning of experience by means of tacit, emotional meaning-making processes. • the organization of personal activity is fundamentally self-referent or recursive. a deep phenomenological sense of selfhood or personal identity. Persons exist and grow in living webs of relationships. • individuals cannot be understood apart from their organic embeddedness in social and symbolic systems. • all of this active, meaningful, and socially-embedded self-organization reflects an ongoing developmental flow in which dynamic dialectical tensions are essential.

10. four basic assumptions of the social constructionist position • A critical stance towards taken-for-granted knowledge - The world does not present itself objectively to the observer, but is known through human experience which is largely influenced by language. • ·      Historical and cultural specificity - The categories in language used to classify things emerge from the social interaction within a group of people at a particular time and in a particular place. Categories of understanding, then, are situational. • ·      Knowledge is sustained by social process - How reality is understood at a given moment is determined by the conventions of communication in force at that time. The stability of social life determines how concrete our knowledge seems to be. • ·      Knowledge and social action go together - Reality is socially constructed by interconnected patterns of communication behaviour. Within a social group or culture, reality is defined not so much by individual acts, but by complex and organized patterns of ongoing actions.

11. 联系刘鹰 《学生双语报》 电子邮址: derek@dyl.name 个人网站：www.dyl.name报社网站：www.51learn.net