A Study On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading,as the main channel of language input,is an important part of language learning skills,and how to improve students’ English reading ability has become a major issue in English reading teaching.As far as we can see,there are some drawbacks in high school English reading teaching,such as the singularity of the teaching mode of English reading class,students’ lack of interest in reading,and their lack of ability to use reading strategies.Although teachers and students spend a lot of time and energy,the results are not satisfactory.How to effectively improve students’ English reading levels and how to improve traditional English reading teaching methods have become a challenging task for high school English teaching.This paper attempts to apply scaffolding instruction to high school English reading in order to develop students’ reading strategies and improve their English reading performance.Scaffolding instruction is proposed by the famous American educator Bruner in the 1970 s based on Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development and Constructivism Theory.This mode of teaching means that when students encounter problems beyond their current cognitive level,teachers or peers will provide support and guidance to help them enter the situation smoothly,and then investigate independently,learn cooperatively,master and apply what they have learned,and finally be able to complete the learning task independently.The research questions include:(1)What are the main effects of scaffolding instruction on high school students’ English reading strategies?(2)What are the main effects of scaffolding instruction on high school students’ English reading test scores?In this study,the author mainly adopted tests,questionnaires,and interview.The subjects of this study are students from two parallel classes in a middle school in Zhengzhou.In the two classes,the scaffolding instruction method and the traditional teaching method are used respectively for a semester of teaching experiments.Before the experiment,a questionnaire survey is conducted on the two classes to understand students’ current use of reading strategies.Then the two classes are pretested to test whether their reading scores are at the same level.After the experiment,a postquestionnaire survey is conducted among students in the two classes to understand the changes in students’ use of reading strategies,and a post-test is conducted in the two classes with the same difficulty test paper to test whether there is a difference in students’ reading levels.At the same time,some students in the experimental class are interviewed.All questionnaires and tests are analyzed by SPSS23.0.After a semester of research and practice,the main findings of this experiment are as follows:(1)The scaffolding instruction helps students master reading strategies.Compared to the control class,students in the experimental class master more reading strategies and are able to use more reading strategies to guide their reading and complete English reading tasks more quickly.(2)Scaffolding is conducive to improving students’ reading skills.Under the guidance of scaffolding theory,the overall situation of high school students’ English reading levels has improved and their performance has improved.The results of the study show that scaffolding instruction plays an important role in the development of students’ reading ability and reading strategies,and is more advantageous than the traditional translation teaching method.Based on the implementation of this experiment,the author has drawn some insights: first,teachers should give full play to students’ subjectivity according to the characteristics of the five major implementation aspects of scaffolding instruction;second,teachers should use the scaffolding types rationally and flexibly to teach students according to their abilities to promote the development of students’ English reading strategies and reading abilities.