【正文】 wn knowledge, individually and collectively.The theory of constructivism can be traced to the eighteenth century and to the work of the Neapolitan philosopher Guambattista Vico, who maintained that humans could understand only what they had themselves constructed.Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky are the eminent contemporaries who developed the educational constructivist ideas. Piaget believed that ideas were individual creations and individuals could generate knowledge and specify the processes involved in its production. According to Piaget, “To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be plied with if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition”4For Piaget, science is the product of the thinking mind’s conceptualization. From this perspective, knowledge does not represent an independent reality but is a collection of inventions that happen to fit the world as it is experienced. According to Piaget, the process of equilibration, which includes two crucial concepts, pushes forward one’s cognitive development: assimilation and acmodation, which make up a child’s adaptation to the environment. Assimilation refers to a child’s transforming ining information so that it fits within the existing thought patterns while acmodation refers to a child’s adapting to the thought patterns to include ining information. Piaget has had a profound influence on shaping modern education for broad instructional approaches.John Dewey was for a lifetime engaged in elaborating the constructivist theory of knowledge. For Dewey, education depends on action。 knowledge and ideas e only from a situation in which learners draw themselves out of their experiences that have meaning and importance to them. As Dewey wrote in his landmark Democracy and Education in 1916:The essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation experience__that there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake。 secondly, that a genuine problem develop within his situation as a stimulus to thought。 thirdly, that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it。 fourthly, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way。 fifthly, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.By proposing the five points, Dewey designed a learning munity in which learners were able to engage in realworld activities and demonstrate the knowledge learned through creativity and collaboration.The Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, also made major contributions to the development of educational constructivism. Central to Vygtsky’s theory was his belief that biological and cultural developments did not occur in isolation. According to Vygtsky, language was not only a cognitive tool of munication, but that the use of the tool shaped our cultural evolution. Unlike Piaget who suggested that there was an endpoint to the goal of human cognitive development by dividing the cognitive process into stages, Vygotsky proposed that human cognitive development was a lifelong process, which depended on social interaction and social learning. Learning to Vygotsky occured within what he called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which he described as “the distance between the actual development 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”5. Based on the Vygotskian conceptualization of cognitive development, instruction should be designed to reach a developmental level that is just above the student’s current level.Rogers and Freiberg have criticized current education for failing to recognize that much of the material presented to the students in the classroom has, for the student, the same perplexing, meaningless quality that the list of nonsense syllables has for teachers. This is especially true of Chinese EFL learners whose monolingual background provides no context for the material with which he or she is confronted. Rogers and Freiberg regard personal involvement and selfinitiated involvement as important elements in significant learning. They state, “…to involve the whole person in learning means to set the right brain free, to use it as well. …It (the right brain) is intuitive. It grasps the essence before it understands the details…. Significant learning bines the logical and the intuitive, the intellect and the feelings, the concept and the experience, the idea and the meaning”6.Constructivist learning theories advocate participation as a way concerning learning of both absorbing and being absorbed in the munity of practice. It supports learning by enabling learners to acquire, develop and use cognitive tools in authentic domain activities. Learning advances through collaborative social interaction and the social construction of knowledge. These approaches are of potentially great importance for how language teaching, especially foreign language teaching, should be conceptualized. Models of WBETIn traditional universities there have been three models of using the Web for English teaching, ranging from simple forms of Web support for regular facetoface classes, all the way to full Webbased English Teaching. It can be classified into the following basic models. Web Support for Information Storage, Dissemination and RetrievalIn this model, the Web supports synchronous or asynchronous English teaching when teachers and students use it to store, disseminate and retrieve information that is relevant to the course. As can be seen in the table below, this type of support may take place outside or within the classroom and may involve public or cour