On Fostering Junior-Middle-School Students' English Oral Communicative Competence Through Scaffolding Instruction

Globalization and Frequent international communication calls for all-round English abilities and fostering our junior-middle-school students' English oral communicative competence has been pushing on agenda. According to Constructivism and ZPD theory and three popular SLA theories: Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis, Swain's comprehensible output hypothesis and Long's interaction hypothesis, the present thesis tries to investigate the application of "scaffolding" into junior-middle-school English teaching in order to foster the students' oral communicative competence. Based on related researches and studies about "scaffolding" and "scaffolding instruction", a general survey about the current states of English teaching and learning in our junior middle schools was conducted among 15 grade-8 English teachers and 150 students from 15 different middle schools. Then, one of the 15 teachers and her class were involved in one-month experimental study of scaffolding instruction. The specific research procedure consists of 8 steps, which are described in chapter 2. The data was collected carefully step by step from the samples through interview, questionnaire and classroom observation. And the main qualitative data collected from the pretest and posttest questionnaires in the subject class was treated with Paired Sample t-test of SPSS. The results of the data has shown that scaffolding can be regarded not only as instruction idea directing the process of English teaching and learning but also as some effective instruction strategies facilitating the improvement of students' oral communicative competence. It also indicates that students' interest and confidence in oral English interaction can be enhanced with various scaffoldings available in class, which is the key to fostering their oral communicative competence in English in the end. Meanwhile, to improve oral communicative competence should take a long period even in an effective and efficient way. Therefore, the thesis just explores the effective scaffolding possibly provided in class and analyzes the impacts of scaffolding on students' oral interaction both in class and outside class.