A Research About Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Reading Class In Senior High School

Reading is regarded as an indispensable skill among the four basic English learning skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing and it is one of the most important means to access information and knowledge. English curriculum in high school emphasizes the importance of English reading ability, but there still exists many problems in current English teaching in senior high school. For instance, the traditional reading teaching method is monotonous. Most of the teachers apply the Grammar-Translation method to English reading teaching. And students are rarely involved in class, it’s hard to show that students are the center of the class.There are many teaching methods to solve the current problems, and Scaffolding Instruction, the writer thinks, may be one of them. Because the Scaffolding Instruction can, on the one hand, motivate students’ interest in English reading and, on the other hand, the Scaffolding Instruction can facilitate their English reading strategies. Thus, it is possible to make the students become the center of the class.In this paper, the writer takes narrative as a teaching case to test whether the Scaffolding Instruction is effective or not in promoting students’ reading abilities. There are three key questions of the research. First, Can Scaffolding Instruction improve students’ English reading ability in senior high school? Second, Can application of the Scaffolding Instruction to senior English reading classroom affect students’ reading strategies? Third, What’s the students’ attitude towards Scaffolding Instruction in experimental class? The participants of the research come from two parallel classes of grade two in a senior high school in Jiangxi. There are 60 students in each class. One class is regarded as the experimental class, and the other is the control class. The whole experiment lasts for one semester. The writer mainly uses the instruments including test,questionnaire and interview to collect the experiment data, and SPSS17.0 is adopted to analyze the experiment data. Based on the analysis of the data, three major findings can be found: Firstly, the application of Scaffolding Instruction to English reading in senior high school can get better teaching results than that of the traditional teaching method.Secondly, the students taught by Scaffolding Instruction grasp better reading strategiesthan that before. Thirdly, Scaffolding Instruction can cultivate students’ self-confidence and reading interest.At last, the paper also points out the limitations of the research and the difficulties which teachers and students encounter in Scaffolding Instruction, and in the end suggestions for further research are mentioned as well.