Republic of the Philippines

Province of Cebu
City of Carcar
CARCAR CITY COLLEGE
P. Vasquez St., Luan-luan, Poblacion 1, Carcar City, Cebu
Tel. No.: (032) 487-0063/487-9077 Website: carcarcitycollege.weebly.com

ENG 133
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS AND APPROACHES
Prelim Module 1

Name: ______________________________________ Course: ________________ Date: ___________

THE INTRODUCTION
I. OBJECTIVES
Upon the completion of the module, students should be able to:

 Define constructivism, cognitive constructivist and sociocultural constructivist;

II. PRELIMINARY ACTIVITY

2. Who is Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky and what is his view on constructivism?

III. ABSTRACTION

Constructivism

Constructivism views learning as an interpretive, recursive, and nonlinear process by active learners interacting
with the surroundings of the physical and social world. Two schools of constructivism prevail, namely cognitive
constructivism and sociocultural constructivism. Cognitive constructivism stems from the work of J. Piaget,
featuring the individual learning process and how a person constructs and develops his knowledge through
experience. Sociocultural constructivism, developed by L. S. Vygotsky, emphasizes the social context of learning.
Though Piaget did not include the influence of social inputs, while Vygotsky did not stress the action and reflection
of individual learners, they each told half of a good story of learning that complements the other.

Cognitive Constructivist Theory of Learning

In Piaget’s stance, cognitive constructivism conceives learning as a “holistic, ‘bottom-up process” enacted by
an active learner as the constructor of his knowledge structure. Learning comprises successive and spiral stages in
which a learner’s intellectual growth is mostly influenced by personal intellectual activities while he explores,
manipulates, and understands his experience. Learning occurs through self-regulation, which involves retroactive
and participatory construction and adjustment on the part of the learner in response to the external perturbances.
The mechanism that promotes change in cognitive structure is equilibrium, which accounts for a learner’s continual
adaptation to the world around him in a nonlinear, flexible, and open way. The complexity of equilibrium makes
clear how learning is continuing, how thought is marked by “acceptance or rejection of something as reasonably
probable or improbable” , and how living itself could be defined as knowing. What cognitive constructivist theory
of learning informs University ELT is that learning is an active process in which students construct new ideas and
concepts based on their past and present language knowledge. They develop abilities to select information, originate
assumptions, and make decisions in the process of integrating learning experience into their existing cognitive
structure. This process allows them to proceed beyond the surface of information given and to interact with the
environment by exploring and manipulating objects.

Sociocultural Constructivist Theory of Learning

The sociocultural perspective of S/FL acquisition originates in the work of Vygotsky , who studied the role of social
experience in the development of individual knowledge. Vygotsky placed emphasis on the social context of
learning, namely, how social and cultural contexts affect a learner’s cognition, or how the social environment
accounts for the development of the higher cognitive process. Vygotsky stressed the connectedness between
learning and a learner’s social and cultural world. Since people start to learn long before they attend school, any
learning one encounters in school, argued Vygotsky , has a “previous history” . The pedagogical implication is
that all fundamental cognitive activities have social foundations, and cognitive skills and patterns of thinking are
products of the activities practiced in the social institutions of the culture in which individuals grow up and mature
through the process of “internalization, which is the process whereby the individual, through participation in
interpersonal interaction in which cultural ways of thinking are demonstrated in action, is able to appropriate them
so they become transformed from being social phenomena to being part of his or her own intrapersonal mental
functioning.
The two types of interaction, interpersonal and intrapersonal, possess different meanings: the former means
“communicative events and situations which occur between two people,” while the latter is communication
that occurs “within an individual’s mind” . As the sociocultural phenomena, these interactions connect language
and thought, indicating the connection between learning contexts and individuals with opportunities for language
development. Unlike the cognitive constructivist view that biology and development lead learning, Vygotsky
emphasized socially and semiotically mediated learning which propels development. This lies an important
educational tenet that the capacity to teach and to benefit from instructions is the fundamental attribute of human
beings. The zone of proximal development (ZPD) proposed by Vygotsky i s defined as the distance between
the “actual developmental level as determined by independent problem-solving” and the “level of potential
development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable
peers. It functions as a connecting concept and model for the higher cognitive growth and explains how a
learner’s learning experience could be organized as the most effective form of learning that occurs within it. Since
learning involves moving beyond the current level of competence, scaffolding in teaching serves to move learners
into the nearest reaches of their incompetence and assists them to become competent there through socializing and
engaging in activities with a more able adult or a peer who has already mastered that particular function. The
sociocultural constructivist theory of learning is influential in the field of SLA as it verifies that knowledge is
constructed and developed through learning, which occurs through the interaction with others. As a causative force
in acquisition, interaction facilitates language learning, which is essentially a social process based on the
sociocultural settings. To understand how a second or foreign language is learned, it is indispensable to study the
social and educational factors that shape the increasing competence of language learners. This implies that
University English program and its pedagogies must consider scaffolding learners’ social activities and cultural
practices as the source of thinking. The teacher–student and peer interaction must also serve the purpose of language
development.
IV. APPLICATION

***Create a classroom scenario that clearly shows one of the constructivists’ theory of learning.
 V. ASSESSMENT
Create an artistic comparison of Jean Piaget’s and Lev Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive theory of
constructivism.

Please be guided with the following rubrics as to how your work be rated.
AREAS OF 4 3 2 1
ASSESSMENT
IDEA Presents idea in Presents idea in a consistent Presents ideas in a general Presents ideas in a vague and
original manner. manner. manner. unclear manner
ORGANIZATION Strong and Organized Unclear Lack of
organized beginning/middle/ending beginning/middle/ending beginning/middle/ending
UNDERSTANDING Shows strong Shows understanding Shows unclear understanding Lack of understanding
understanding

Prepared by:

MARGARITA D. YBAÑEZ
Instructor