| Since the 1970 s, foreign language teaching researchers gradually began to pay more attention to the great influence of affective factors to students? oral English learning. Among these affective factors, anxiety is an important factor that hinders students to improve their spoken English. It not only impedes students to participate in oral English teaching activities, but also leads to emotional repulsion, such as abhorrence and fear, which hinders the improvement of their English level to a great extent. Under the circumstance of e xam-oriented education, the English teaching in China also aims at getting good grades, which does not attach importance to students? oral English training, and rarely cares about students? feelings when they speak English. The “scaffolding instruction” is a mature teaching method based on constructivism theory, which advocates students-centered teaching concept. In English class, conceptual framework will be built by providing clues or hints until students can finish the learning tasks independently. In this study, scaffolding instruction is applied in junior middle school?s oral English class, aiming at exploring its alleviating function to junior middle school students? English speaking anxiety.This study combines quantitative and qualitative research methods, and respectively explores scaffolding instruction?s function in alleviating junior middle school students? speaking anxiety caused by communication apprehension, negative evaluation and oral test. A one-semester teaching experiment is conducted. 93 participants are from two parallel classes in Grade Two of No.X Junior Middle School in XX C ity, XX Province. Traditional teaching method is adopted in one class, which is taken as the control class. Scaffolding instruction is used in the other, which is taken as the experimental class. At the beginning of this experiment, both of the classes are given the questionnaire(FLCAS) to investigate students? anxiety conditions. After one semester?s learning, the same questionnaire is distributed again to measure whether their anxiety conditions become better. Then the data of the questionnaire is dealt with the SPSS 20.0, and a conclusion is drawn based on the quantitative analysis. Meanwhile, in the process of the teaching experiment, the students with serious anxiety condition are interviewed, so that the detailed reasons that cause anxiety can be gotten by qualitative analysis.The research results show that scaffolding instruction has an effect on alleviating students? speaking anxiety caused by communication apprehension, negative evaluation and oral test. In light of the comparison between the pre-test and the post-test, it is easy to find that the anxiety condition of the class using scaffolding instruction is obviously improved, while that of the class us ing traditional teaching method has no obvious change. There are totally four kinds of scaffolds using in the experimental class. The vocabulary-scaffold and background-scaffold can help students alleviate speaking anxiety caused by communication apprehens ion. The advice-scaffold helps them alleviate the fear of negative evaluation and the sample-scaffold helps alleviate the oral test anxiety.Obviously, there are still some shortcomings in this study. For instance, the questionnaire FLCAS originally aims at measuring foreign language anxiety, not aiming at speaking anxiety individually. Therefore, it is modified slightly, which influences its authority to some degree. Due to the geographical restrictions, this study only measures 93 students from one junio r middle school, so the sample size is not big enough. Furthermore, there are many factors that can cause speaking anxiety, but this study only explores three aspects — communication apprehension, negative evaluation and oral test. In addition, only four k inds of scaffolds are used in this study, which are not various enough. |
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