A Study On The Effectiveness Of Scaffolding Instruction In Cultivating Senior High School Students’ Reading Abilities

Reading is the prerequisite and basis for the development of other language skills.The Senior High School English Curriculum Standards require that the English reading teaching should put the cultivation of students’ interest and the improvement of reading abilities in the first place.However,according to the author’s observation,English reading teaching in high school is not optimistic.Students’ interest in English reading is not high and their reading abilities are poor.Therefore,it is important to find a good way to solve the above problems.Scaffolding Theory is a good theory that this theory is derived from Vygotsky’s“the zone of proximal development”,and Scaffolding Instruction is the specific application of Scaffolding Theory in the teaching field.The essence is to use the conceptual framework as a scaffold in gaining knowledge of the process.Teachers can use this kind of scaffold to decompose complex teaching content and learning tasks to progressively increase the students’ intelligence from one level to a new higher level to truly cultivate students’ reading abilities.In order to affirm the effectiveness of Scaffolding Instruction in cultivating senior high school students’ reading abilities,the writer of this thesis performed a 20-week experiment in Chizhou Deming Middle School.Two Classes have been randomly chosen from the parallel classes of Senior One at Chizhou Deming Senior High School.One class was regarded as the experimental class,while the other class was regarded as the control class.Meanwhile,the control class was taught by the traditional English reading teaching method,while the experimental class was taught by the Scaffolding Instruction.This research aims to answer the following three questions:(1)Does Scaffolding Instruction stimulate students’ reading interest?(2)Does Scaffolding Instruction cultivate students’ reading strategies?(3)Does Scaffolding Instruction improve students’ reading abilities?Data used to be gathered via tests,questionnaires and interviews and analyzed through the use of SPSS to observe the effectiveness of Scaffolding Instruction in cultivating senior high school students’ reading abilities.The results of the research indicate:(1)Scaffolding Instruction can cultivate students’ reading interest.(2)By combining the five-step of Scaffolding Instruction with the five types of scaffolds,students gradually mastered reading strategies such as understanding the main idea of the reading text and understanding the new words in the context.(3)Scaffolding Instruction cultivates students’ reading abilities and effectively improves students’ reading grades.This study gives the following enlightenment for the senior high school English reading teaching:(1)In terms of educational concepts,teachers ought to require students to actively accumulate and organize data,analyze applicable information,and construct knowledge independently to enhance their reading abilities.(2)In the teacher-student relationship,teachers should strive to create a pleasant and warm learning atmosphere to let students fall in love with reading and stimulate students’ reading interest.