An Experimental Study On Scaffolding Instruction In Senior High School English Listening Teaching

The National English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017)and the current society have put forward higher requirements for English listening teaching.However,there are still some problems in the current senior high school English listening teaching,such as the backwardness of teaching methods and teachers’ neglect of listening skills training.Therefore,it is of great significance to find an efficient English listening teaching method.To explore the efficient method,this study takes Constructivist Learning Theory,Zone of Proximal Development and Input Hypothesis as the theoretical bases,and conducts an experiment in teaching listening with Scaffolding Instruction.Scaffolding Instruction emphasizes that students should be the subjects and teaching should be carried out in students’ zone of proximal development.It also propagates that teachers should provide students with appropriate scaffolding to guide students to conduct independent exploration and cooperative learning,and finally enable students to master knowledge and skills.A large number of studies have proved that Scaffolding Instruction has a positive impact on students’ reading and writing abilities,but there are relatively few studies on the application of Scaffolding Instruction in senior high school English listening teaching.Hence,the present study applies Scaffolding Instruction to senior high school English listening teaching,aiming to explore its effect on senior high school students’ English listening micro-skills of analyzing and reasoning,obtaining specific information and summarizing the main idea.In this study,130 students from two classes of Grade 11 in a senior high school in Hengshui,Hebei Province are selected as the subjects for a three-month teaching experiment.In the experimental class,Scaffolding Instruction is used for listening teaching,while in the control class,the traditional listening teaching method is adopted.The author conducts pre-test and post-test in the two classes respectively,and analyzes the collected data by SPSS23.0 to explore the changes of the three English listening micro-skills in the two classes after the experiment.After the teaching experiment,the author interviews 6 students of different levels in the experimental class to further understand their views and suggestions on Scaffolding Instruction.The results of the study show that applying Scaffolding Instruction to senior high school English listening teaching can significantly improve senior high school students’ listening micro-skills of analyzing and reasoning,obtaining specific information and summarizing the main idea.It is hoped that the research results of the thesis can provide some reference for the application of Scaffolding Instruction in senior high school English listening teaching.