An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Affordance On The College Students' English Reading Competence Under Sociocultural Theory

Reading is a major means for learners to obtain knowledge and information.Reading course is thus a compulsory course that learners must learn at all stages.While in the traditional College English reading teaching,most students are not active in participating in such classroom activities as reading texts.What students lack is the competence to take the initiative and the competence to query information.At the same time,they are more confused about how to read and learn.The instructions given by teachers during the teaching process are also very general because they lack of proper teaching philosophy.Therefore,it is an important topic for teachers to improve the traditional teaching methods and help college students to enhance reading competence.Based on the affordance theory and sociocultural theory research in the field of second language acquisition.this study investigates the current affordance situation of College English reading,and grafts the positive affordance teaching mode into the College English reading class.This study mainly focuses on the impact of positive affordance on college students' English reading interest and reading competence.The research questions include:1)What is the affordance situation in College English reading instruction?2)What are the influences of positive affordance on students' reading interests?3)What changes will positive affordance have on college students' reading competence?This study takes 75 sophomores of non-English majors from a university in Liaoning province as subjects.The author assigns class B2 as a control class(CC)and teaches the students with traditional teaching method,B4 class as experimental class(EC)and teaches with a positive affordance teaching method.Pre-test,post-test,questionnaires and interviews serve as the research tools,as well as Excel 2007 and SPSS 17.0 for data collection and analysis.The research results show that,influenced by the traditional teaching methods,during the current College English reading class,there are less learning resources,less interactive learning opportunities,poor perception and interpretation competence,and passive learning behavior.While in the positive affordance teaching model,students have a strong interest in English reading,take the initiative to study,and their English reading competence has been significantly improved.This study proves significant for College English reading instruction in that it has suggested that teachers should create a good English reading teaching model by providing positive affordance so as to enrich the current English reading teaching methods and improve the teaching efficiency.This study makes up for the deficiency of traditional teaching methods,and offers some experience and reference points for foreign language teachers.Due to the limitations of the actual operation environment and the author's research level,this study still needs to be improved.