A Study On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Junior English Reading Teaching

Reading is an important part of English language skills, and it is always regarded as the crucial source of language input. In the promoted student-centered reading class, all of the English teachers should follow the differences among the students, in order to seek a way to train students’ English reading effectively. There is no doubt that scaffolding instruction can promote the English reading, however, the specific effects are not clarified, so it becomes a challenging target when teachers are faced with how to make the current English reading teaching more effective in accordance with this teaching method.Scaffolding instruction was supported by constructivism, which relied on “the Zone of Proximal Development” created by Vygotsky. In the English reading class, Scaffolding Instruction includes five procedures: offering the scaffold, entering the situation, independent explorations, cooperation studies and evaluation. In each procedure, Scaffolding Instruction emphasizes the interaction between teacher and students, the interaction between students, aiming to develop the ability of reading and thinking independently, as well as improving their integrative competence to use English in English reading class.There are three research questions: 1) How does the Scaffolding Instruction affect the students’ English reading? 2) Which aspects of English reading does the Scaffolding instruction improve? 3)What procedures affect the English reading mostly in five procedures of Scaffolding Instruction? The subjects were two parallel classes’ students of a Grade One from No.43 junior high school, Class Five was experimental class and Class Four was control class. The experimental class adopted the Scaffolding Instruction in English reading; instead, the control class adopted the traditional Grammar-translation method. The author collected data from pre-test、post-test、questionnaire and interviews. Through the experiment, the author found the methods which can affect the junior English reading ability by using SPSS 19.0.There was no doubt that this research had some drawbacks and shortcomings. On the whole, this study has attained the expected outcomes. Besides, it comes up with some feasible advice on the scaffolding instruction teaching and gives some useful guidance to further study in the future.