Research On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction Into English Listening And Speaking Teaching In Junior Middle School

English listening and speaking teaching is a prominent and significant constituent of English instruction in junior middle school. The New English Curriculum Standards also point out:the goal of English teaching at present is to cultivate students’ comprehensive language using ability, especially the abilities of listening and speaking. However, although the current English teaching modes in junior middle school have achieved success in cultivating the language testing skills of students, there are also lots of problems existing. Among them the more prominent and urgent problems are:(1) In this classroom teaching model, it’s mainly the teacher who acts as a speaker while the students are passive listeners:exam-oriented education prevails; (2) The teaching situation is missing and learning strategies are stale; (3) The curriculum evaluation methods are single and evaluation system is not reasonable. Therefore, how to carry out English listening and speaking activities effectively together with how to explore a proper English listening and speaking teaching mode is a common problem that the majority of the teachers pay close attention to currently, and it’s the purpose of this study as well.Scaffolding instruction model is a new sort of teaching mode formed under the guidance of theories of Constructivism and the Zone of Proximal Development. This teaching mode has been widely used in English instruction, but the previous researches mainly concentrate on English listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar teaching in university or senior middle school, the exploration based on the application of this advanced teaching model to English listening and speaking teaching in junior middle school stage is rather less. Therefore it has a certain reference value to try this teaching model in the junior middle school English listening and speaking teaching. In this thesis, in order to improve and optimize the current junior middle school English listening and speaking teaching situation, based on "The Zone of Proximal Development" of the students’English listening and speaking level, the author will build the scaffolding instruction English listening and speaking mode with the basic links:"setting up the scaffolds; entering the situation; independent exploration; collaborative learning and effect assessment" and the main teaching stages:"before listening and speaking; while listening and speaking practice; while listening and speaking communication as well as after listening and speaking".To testify the teaching effect of applying scaffolding instruction to English listening and speaking teaching in junior middle school, we conducted an 18-week teaching experiment in Xixian No.1 Junior Middle School, about 160 students from two parallel classes(they are regarded as the controlled class and the experimental class) participated in the experiment. Before the experiment, by asking the students to have a pre-test and using SPSS 19.0 software for statistics and analysis of English scores, the results show that the students of the two classes are at the same level of English listening and speaking. And we also learn about the current status of English listening and speaking teaching as well as the existing problems in English listening and speaking learning in junior middle school through questionnaire and interview. According to these problems, we propose the experimental hypotheses and design the experimental process. During the experiment, the students in the controlled class (CC) still received the traditional teaching model (the task-based teaching method), while the students in the experimental class (EC) were taught by scaffolding instruction. At the end of the experiment, the students took part in the post-test. Then the data from the post-test was collected and analyzed in the same way. The experiment results indicate that the students’ English listening and speaking level in the two classes is quite different, the students of experimental class made more progress. Meanwhile in the experiment, in order to learn about the detailed information of students’ participation in the English listening and speaking classroom activities, the students’ interest in English listening and speaking learning and their confidence in learning English well, we used the methods of classroom observation and interviews.Based on the theoretical guidance and experimental verification, we draw the following conclusions:first, the scaffolding teaching can help teachers to improve the junior middle school students’ English listening and speaking skills and abilities more effectively; second, scaffolding instruction is helpful to cultivate the students’ autonomous learning abilities and team cooperation consciousness, and improve the enthusiasm of the students’ participation in English classroom activities; Third, scaffolding instruction can inspire the students’interest in English listening and speaking learning, and enhance the confidence of cross-cultural communication.