A Study Of The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar, as a system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence, is the foundation and the core in English. It can be concluded that English grammar teaching is very important. However, because of the current problems in traditional grammar teaching and the recent revolution in grammar teaching, there is an unsatisfactory grammar teaching situation. On the one hand teachers do not have a clear idea about grammar teaching. There are two extremes, one is “teacher explains and students practice”, and the other is “desalinating the teaching grammar”. On the other hand students hold the idea that English grammar learning is complex and boring.The thesis aims to build a suitable scaffold for English grammar teaching on the basis of such theories as Constructivism and Vygostky’s Zone of Proximal Development Theory and to improve the English grammar teaching situation.Based on the research background and purpose, the research questions are summarized as follows:(1) Can scaffolding instruction enhance students’ interest in grammar?(2) Can scaffolding instruction improve students’ grammar achievements?(3)What is the implication gained from the grammar achievement of the high group students,middle group students and low group students after scaffolding grammar teaching?Experimental research and questionnaires are employed in this thesis. The participants were students from two classes of Grade Two in Benxi No.2 Senior High School as experimental class and control class respectively. The teaching experiment has lasted nearly four months. The scaffolding instruction was applied into the experiment class and the traditional instruction was adopted in the control class. The sources of the data were from the pre-test, the post-test and the questionnaires for students. All the collected data are analyzed by SPSS16.0.Through the compared results between the experimental class and the control class,the conclusion can be drawn that scaffolding instruction can enhance students’ interest in grammar. Moreover the instruction also improves students’ grammar achievements. And the students with low scores benefit more from the scaffolding instruction than the students with high scores.