Chapter One Literature Review
1.1 Constructivism
The theory of constructivism draws from many disciplines includingphilosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology and pedagogy. However, itderived from the cognitive psychology and was put forward by Piaget in 1960s.Since then, constructivism has been widely used in all aspects. Moreover, since1990s，英语论文范文，constructivism has been widely applied to the system of the westerneducation and brought a striking change in the field of education.The concept of constructivism is very vague and only some scholars brieflydefined and interpreted the concept from quite different perspectives. Duckworth(1987:112) defined the constructivism as "meaning is not given to us in ourencounters, but it is given by us, constructed by us，each in our own way,according to how our understanding is currently organized." That is to say，英语论文题目，learners actively construct and create the meaning and understanding. VonGlasersfeld (1989: 162) described constructivism as “a theory of knowledge withroots in philosophy, psychology, and cybernetics". At the mean time,constructivism is defined as “a theory to explain how knowledge is constructed inthe human being when information comes into contact with, existing knowledgethat had been developed by experience" (Richard, 1998: 203).
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1.2 Researches on Feedback
Feedback is m important part of the process-oriented approach of writinginstruction. As Amdt(1992; 91) stated，"feedback is immensely important inhelping the writer assess how effectively the written words are mediating feeintCTided message and meaning, and the giver of feedback makes a central andcritical contribution to the evolution of a piece of writing".Keh(1990: 294) defined feedback as "input from a reader to a writer with theeffect of providing information to the writer for revision". He interpreted feedbackas "comments, questions and suggestions a_ reader gives to a writer to produce'reader-based prose'". In other words, writers can leam from what they haveconfused and where they have been misled. What's more, Longman Dictionary ofLanguage Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richard et aL, 1998:231) describedfeedback as "comments or information learners received on the success of alearning task, either from the teacher or from other learners".Based on the definitions mentioned above，feedback can be perceived asinformation or comments offered by teachers, peers or self with respect to theperformance of writing. It emphasizes the process-oriented teaching of writing andaims at the development of writing skills. In a word, feedback in this thesis arecomments, questions, response and suggestions a reader offered to a writer so thathe or she can revise his or her composition to be better. Moreover, in order tobetter understand the nature of this research, the words of response, review,evaluation and feedback in this thesis are often used as the synonyms ofassessment.
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Chapter Two Research Design
2.1 Research Questions
In line with researcher review, many domestic and foreign researches on theeffects of peer feedback and self feedback to promote the EFL writing have beenconducted in the foreign language teaching and acquisition, but results are quited
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