A Study Of The Effect Of Instruction Under SCT On The Reading Achievement

The Sociocultural Theory (SCT) was first proposed by Lev Vygotsky, which stresses that all human activities, mediated by language and other symbol systems, occur in social and cultural environments. Namely, the interaction between human and socio-cultural environment initiates the continuous development in human’s thought and behavior.The present research was implemented to find out the effect of SCT on reading comprehension skills of college non-English major freshmen. Two classes consisting of30students respectively were selected as the experimental and control group. Besides, eight unites are selected from the students’English textbook as teaching material. In the present research, which lasted for18weeks, the experimental group was taught by means of ISCT while the control group was taught with traditional teaching method. Pre-and post-test were applied to measure the impact of the ISCT on the participants’ achievement. ANCOVA was employed to seek out whether there are any significant differences in overall reading mean scores of each group. MANCOVA was also used to find out the differences in their posttest mean scores on five reading levels respectively.Statistics of the research demonstrate that there are significant differences in the experimental group while there are no significant differences in pre and posttest mean scores of control group. Besides, the posttest mean scores of experimental group are higher than the control group whether on overall reading or on five reading levels. These findings suggest that the ISCT was helpful in improving learners’reading comprehension achievement. Therefore, it is recommended that this new instructional method be integrated into the English curriculum.