Abstract

The Communities of Practice Project of The Small Community of English Learning in PUCC

Author(s): Ming Li

Under the use of the ideas of Wenger’s Communities of Practice, the research project was conducted for the purpose of observation on the improvement of learning ability of the community members in a private university in Central China (PUCC). By using the new social theory of learning, the questionnaires were distributed to the university’s three major departments, the international education department, the business department, and the electronic information engineering department. The major elements around the thirteen questions in the survey included meaning, practice, community and identity. Of the four factors, the element love of community received the most attention from the participants (n=219). The method used in this project is descriptive statistics. Besides the questionnaires, the author of this paper also took part in the real activities in classes. At the same time, the author collected some information related to these small communities from the English teachers of those classes. Participant comments with the highest frequencies revolved around the love of the new study method, the improvement of selfability, the better communication among the classmates, and the expectation on the prosperity of the community