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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
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Social ConstrutXnism and Learning Strategies
An Alternative Approach for practical purpose
Derek Ying Liu( 刘鹰 )
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
Confusion and Chinese construction
• A lot of confusion, objection and debate• But it is also chinesely constructed proces
s• The issues is not the authenticity but how i
t is constructed in Chinese way and for a Chinese purpose
• No final judgment offered
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
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?
Does it Matter?• No
– It is only a label– Constructed
• Yes– Micro, psychological – Macro, social
• That is all
What is it anyway?
• The constructionist – No unified theory– No unified assumptions/hypnoses– Few if any experimental support
•
Five basic themes of constructivism
• active agency• Order• Self• social-symbolic relatedness• lifespan development.
A brief explanation • human experiencing involves continuous active agency. This disting
uishes 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.
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.
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