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Extensive Reading is a compulsory course of English major's basic teaching, as well as a basic course of practice which makes students obtain a lot of English readings and cultivate their reading skills as well. With a wide range of subjects, the course intends to help the students master reading skills, improve their reading ability and speed, and foster students' logic thinking abilities such as hypothetical judgment and analysis induction through plenty of time devoted to reading. In addition, reading training helps students to enlarge their vocabulary, absorb the knowledge of language and cultural background, improve the cultural awareness, enhance the sense of English and cultivate students’ interest in reading, so as to improve their practical ability of application of language.
Based on the theory of constructivism, this paper aims to analyze the present situation of the extensive reading teaching at Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NJUST), and to put forward effective training methods, eventually to improve the students' practical application of English.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Research on Innovation Capability
In recent years, in order to keep up with the change of the world and society, the training objectives for the English majors in Chinese colleges and universities have changed obviously. In the late 1990s, the idea of educating creative English talents was proposed, and cultivating students’ innovation capability, as an important aspect of its training objectives, was much discussed and studied. The teaching syllabus for English majors in the China which was promulgated and implemented by the Ministry of Education in April, 2000 (referred to as "outline") emphasizes that innovation capability mainly refers to the ability of analyzing problems and proposing opinions, and the capability of organizing and dealing with kinds of things and so on(2000).
Since then, more specific interpretations have been conducted by scholars.
In Wen 's opinion (2002(4):12-17), innovation capability includes the creative thinking that innovation needs and the practical ability to solve problems. The alleged creative thinking ability means the students must possess the quality of agility, flexibility, critique, exploration and multi-directional thinking. Practical ability of problem-solving includes the capability of communicating and cooperating with people, learning from others as well as the ability to deal with complex issues and make decisions.
Lu and Zhou(2008(6):74-77) believe that innovative capability of English Majors should be examined and analyzed from the character, the role and incidence and the content of the major: 1), from the point of subject character of major, English major belongs to the category of humanity. This character determines the non-materiality of innovation for English majors, whose expressive forms are shown as new ideas, new methods and so on. 2), from the aspect of the role and incidence, the innovation capability of English majors should be mainly evaluated from the activities of inpiduals as well as longitudinal comparisons and developments. In other words, this kind of innovation capability is relatively said to students’ existing knowledge and ability. As long as what they do is original and unique, it can be regarded as innovative activities. 3), from the dimension of innovative content, "innovation" of the English majors should be combined closely with their major.
Accordingly, we can see that to a large extent the innovation capability of English majors should be reflected in the professional learning and practice.
2.2 Research on Constructivism
2.2.1 The Formation and Development of Constructivism
Constructivism was originated by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget in 1966. The school he founded was the most influential school of thought in the field of cognitive development, which was known as the "Piaget school". The forerunner of the modern constructivism is Piaget(1966) and Vygotsky(1986) 's intellectual development theory. The "Piaget Epistemology principle" was published in 1970, which studied the formation and development of knowledge. Piaget did systemic and in-depth research on children's psychology on the dimension of cognition's formation and development, and then he proposed that cognition was a kind of active construction which was based on the learners ' existing knowledge and experience. That is just the core of the constructivism. (Chapman, 1988). And R. Sternberg(1986) and D. Katz(1948), who stressed the key role of inpidual initiative in the process of construction of cognitive structures, made a serious exploration about how to give play to the inpidual initiative during the process. The cultural and historical development theory suggested by Vygotsky(1986), emphasized the role of learners in the cognitive process in which social and cultural and historical background were both involved, and put forward the theory of "zone of proximal development".