The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Teaching Reading In Vocational School

As the main tool to obtain information, reading plays an important role in English learning for vocational students. Improving students’ reading competence is one of the objectives of vocational English teaching. Many researchers have investigated how to effectively guide the reading instruction and improve students’ reading ability. Though great progress has been made in English reading teaching, the current situation is still not so satisfactory in vocational schools. In order to solve this problem, the writer attempted to find an effective way which can be applied in the practice of English reading teaching.Scaffolding Instruction, which was originated from the theory of Zone of Proximal Development proposed by Vygotsky, is a teaching strategy first put forward by Jerome Bruner. It helps learners to complete the tasks that are impossible or difficult to finish independently through setting up scaffolds which are designed by the teachers according to learners’ ZPD. With completion of this task, a learner also improved his ability. After a period of training, when the temporary support is removed, the learner can solve problems on his own, which makes him more independent and confident. There are five steps of the scaffolding instruction model, which are Providing the scaffold, Entering the situation, Exploring and discovering, Cooperative learning, and Evaluation. The instruction divides complex tasks into ordinary ones, which helps students to arouse interest and build up confidence in English reading. It also provides a good guidance for vocational teachers to organize English reading classes.There are three research questions in the study: 1) Can scaffolding instruction help arouse vocational students’ interests in reading? 2) How do students respond to scaffolding instruction? 3)Can scaffolding instruction improve vocational students’ reading ability? The first question is to find out whether scaffolding instruction can help students to arouse interest in reading. The second question is to find out whether this approach is really beneficial to the students. The last question tries to testify whether students’ reading ability can be improved after a semester of training by scaffolding instruction. Therefore, an experiment was carried out during the period from September, 2013 to January, 2014. Two parallel classes of Grade 1 from Nursing Department of Lian Yungang Chinese Traditional Medicine College of Jiangsu Union Technical Institute were selected as control class and experimental class. The author collected data by the instruments of tests, questionnaires and interviews, and analyzed data by using SPSS 19.0 to investigate the feasibility of scaffolding instruction in vocational English reading classes.The results show that scaffolding instruction is helpful to inspire students’ interest, and improve the students’ reading ability and strategies. In brief, this study proves that scaffolding instruction is beneficial to students’ reading learning.