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

For a long time, reading is considered as one of the most important skills among thefour language skills which are listening, speaking, reading and writing. Because it is animportant tool to obtain information as well as a main channel to develop students’ Englishlearning ability and language applied ability. So how to improve students’ English readingability is the most important problem in English Teaching of senior high schools. But inactual teaching, the teacher dominates the whole class by explaining the language duringall the hours with less participation of the learners．Consequently, the current situation ofEnglish reading teaching is still not satisfactory. In order to solve this problem, the writertries to find an effective teaching method which can be applied in the practice of Englishreading teaching.Since American educationalist Jerome Bruner put forward Scaffolding Instructiontheory in1970s, it became a hot topic in education research in1990s. More and moreresearchers pay attention to apply Scaffolding Theory in English reading teaching. TheScaffolding Instruction is a teaching model which is derived from the former Soviet Unioneducationalist Vygotskian’s theory, the zone of proximal development. It helps learnerscomplete the process of meaning-constructing through five links which are providingscaffolds, entering the situation, independent explorations, collaborative learning andapplication of evaluation. This research under the guidance of Scaffolding Theory, exploreswhether the Scaffolding Instruction can be applied to the English reading teaching.This paper intends to study the3research questions, respectively are the possibilitieswhich using Scaffolding Instruction to improve students’ English reading ability, tostimulate students’ interest in English learning, and to increase students’ overall Englishscore. In order to solve these questions, a12weeks experiment was carried out inSeptember,2013. Two parallel classes of Grade2from No.3Senior high school ofLiaoyang County were selected as control class and experiment class. The author collecteddata by the means of tests, questionnaires and interview and analyzed data by using SPSSto study the feasibility of apply Scaffolding Instruction in senior high school Englishreading class.In post-test, the sig (2-tailed) is0.000lower than0.05, which shows that there is asignificant difference between EC and CC in the test of reading. And in the post-questionnaire on students’ interest, the sig (2-tailed) is lower than0.05, too. So theresults indicate that Scaffolding Instruction is helpful to enhance the students’ readingproficiency. It not only improves students’ reading interests but increases their overallEnglish score. Thus, the Scaffolding Instruction can be used in English reading teaching ofsenior high school. However, no teaching method is perfect. The author also talks about theproblems and limitations of the research and gives some suggestions for future researches.