Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Research
Business English (BE) has undergone rapid development, especially nowadayswith the soaring globalization of economy. Despite the fact that BE courses are setup in many universities, China is short of talents of Business English skills sincequite a lot of BE majored graduates are not qualified in certain abilities required bytheir real jobs, especially in BE writing ability. One of the reasons lying behind thisproblem is that there are inadequacies existing in the current teaching materials ofBE writing. Thus it is important to conduct further researches on BE writingcourse-books to dig deeper about the unfavorable aspects and get rid of them.Although a few researches were conducted on BE writing course-books, none ofthem studied it from a constructivist perspective.Constructivism, holding the basic idea that knowledge must be constructed bythe learner and can not be supplied by the teacher (Bringuier, 1980), has had awide-ranging impact on teaching models and methods in education and been anunderlying theme of many reform movements. Actually, it has become an importantguideline for education reform all over the world, with China not being an exception.Application of constructivist theory into teaching models and methods is a hot topicto study nowadays. Many Chinese scholars and educators made researches on theapplication of constructivist theory into English teaching and instruction in China.However, relatively quite a few of them paid any attention to the requirements forcourse-books used in constructivist learning processes, taking Business EnglishWriting course-book as an example. This phenomenon can perhaps mainly beattributed to the fact that there is no explicit statement about teaching materials orcourse-books in the system of constructivist theories.
1.2 Significance of the Research
As Chen Bao (2017) proposed, the design of course-books should conform tothe teaching principle since course-books and teaching methods are intimatelyconnected with each other. Constructivism views learning as learner-centered andpays great attention to learners’ experiences and activities, which happens to be thevery goal the teaching of BE writing strives to achieve. Therefore, constructivistprinciples could provide us a novel perspective to study the design and developmentof BE writing course-books. Learners will benefit a lot through constructivistlearning with the help of teaching materials or course-books composed in accordancewith the guiding ideology of constructivism. Thus, it will be significant for theauthor to analyze BE writing course-books in China from a constructivistperspective.The present study aims to (1) work out constructivist views on proper BEcourse-books; (2) then analyze the Business English Writing course-books in Chinato find out in which aspects, if any, the course-books fail to meet the requirements ofconstructivism, and find out the possible reasons for the existing problems; (3) andfinally figure out solutions to get rid of these unfavorable aspects and improve thecurrent situation of BE writing course-books.
1.3 Structure of the thesis
This thesis consists of five chapters and a conclusion part which are organizedas follows:Chapter 1 introduces the background and significance of the research.Chapter 2 reviews the literature related to this ，英语论文，英语毕业论文 |
