A Study On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction In College English Reading Teaching

This paper tends to find out whether Scaffolding Instruction can help develop students’interest in reading; whether Scaffolding Instruction can cultivate students’ reading confidenceand whether Scaffolding Instruction can improve students’ reading ability.The present thesis overviews the relevant researches abroad and in china. Based on theConstructivism theory, Vygotsky theory----the zone of proximal development, ScaffoldingInstruction promotes the teachers as guides, student-centered learning. Teachers should base onthe students’ zone of proximal development, make use of such activity environment as situation,cooperation, evaluation with its appropriate level of support for students, to form the knowledgeconstruction, so as to enable students to achieve their potential level of development, whichwould be as the basis for further development. Scaffolding Instruction divides the task of readinginto five subsections: offering the scaffold, entering situation, independent exploration,cooperative study and evaluation. The whole process emphasizes the importance of interactionbetween teacher and student, the interaction between student and student, cooperation study andthe difference of students, aimed to arouses their interest in learning English reading, encouragesthem to develop the habit of thinking independently and exploring actively, as well as improvestheir comprehensive proficiency to use English.The author takes80students in Grade4from the Foreign Language Department of FenyangNormal College in Lvliang City as the research subjects, dividing the students into theexperimental group and the control group. The experiment begins from September2012toJanuary2013, a period of four months. The author uses test, questionnaire and interviews tocollect data. Data analysis was done with SPSS18.0to find out about the feasibility ofScaffolding Instruction in English reading. The results show that: Scaffolding Instruction, whichis helpful to improve the students’ reading comprehension, to improve the students’ readinginterest, and to cultivate independence and self-confidence of students is a kind of effectiveteaching method.