The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction In High School English Reading Teaching

The importance of reading has been widely concerned. Reading plays an important role in high school English teaching, and the cultivation of reading ability has become the top priority in high school English teaching. But in fact, high school English reading teaching is faced with many problems and the present situation of students’ English reading is not satisfactory, which influences the students’ English learning and their interests. How to help the students improve their reading ability and how to change the current traditional teaching method has become a very challenging tasks for high school English teaching. As a part of foreign language teaching theories, the Scaffolding Instruction theory is highly valued not only for its theoretical value but also for its widely use.Based on Constructivism, Scaffolding Instruction teaching depends on “the Zone of Proximal Development” originated from Vygotsky. It is a new teaching model that advocates student-centered learning model. It emphasizes that the students construct knowledge from their experience with supportive scaffolds from either the teachers or a more skilled peer. Teachers provide some effective classroom activities for enterning a certain situation and making scaffolds to help students finish the meaning-constructing. It also provides a good guidance for organizing reading teaching in high school. This study tried to apply Scaffolding Instruction to high school Enlish reading teaching. The model of the Scaffolding Instruction sets up scaffolds opportunely according to the students’ Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD). The investigator designed the procedures of Scaffolding Instruction as follows: providing scaffolds, entering the situation, independent exploration, cooperative learning, effect evaluation.There are three research questions in the study:1) Compared with the traditional teaching approach, can the application of Scaffolding Instruction improve students’ reading interests?2) Can the application of Scaffolding Instruction improve students’ English reading ability?3) How to apply Scaffolding Instruction to high school English reading teaching?An experiment was carried out during the period from September, 2014 to December, 2014. Two parallel classes are selected from Grade 2 No.3 high school of Lvshun. One of the classes is assigned as the control class, while the other is the experimental class. The traditional teaching method is still used in the control class, and the Scaffolding Instruction is carried out in the experimental class. In the process of this experiment, the investigator used tests, questionnaires and the face to face interview as instruments to get the data. The data collected from the experiment were analyzed by SPSS and Excel.Results show that the use of Scaffolding Instruction in English reading teaching can improve the students’ reading ability, activate the students’ interest and motivation in English reading and improve the students’ ability in solving problems in English reading. Scaffolding Instruction in English reading teaching is effective in pedagogical activities. However, due to the influence of various factors, there are still some shortcomings in this study. We hope the results of this study can provide reference for the further research on the application of Scaffolding Instruction in China.