A Study Of The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Alleviate Senior High School Students' English Reading Anxiety

Reading is a helpful tool for students to obtain information as well as a main bridge to develop students' comprehensive language skill. Improving students' reading competence is one of English teaching objectives. However, due to the exam-oriented educational system, most teachers just focus on the improvement of students' reading scores instead of their improvement of English reading ability in current English reading teaching of senior high school. What's worse, some teachers ignore students' psychological problems in their reading learning process. In fact, English reading anxiety commonly exists in students' reading comprehension and influences their reading performance. How to alleviate students' reading anxiety is an urgent issue.Though English reading anxiety has caused many English educators' attention, the current relevant studies only stay in theoretical stage. Most research has proved that English reading anxiety has negative influence on students' reading achievement theoretically; however, few empirical research has been done to investigate the relationship between reading anxiety and teaching method. Therefore, this research attempts to apply an effective teaching method—scaffolding instruction to English reading teaching of senior high school and explores the effectiveness of scaffolding instruction on alleviating students' English reading anxiety.In this research, the author selects two natural classes in Tanghe No.1 senior high school to carry out an experiment. During the experiment, scaffolding instruction is applied in the experimental class while the traditional reading teaching method is conducted in the control class. This study attempts to answer the following questions:1. What are the different levels of senior high school students' English reading anxiety?2. How does the English reading anxiety affect students' reading achievement?3. How to use scaffolding instruction to alleviate students' English reading anxiety?The experiment lasts for three months. Research instruments used in this research include questionnaire, interview and test, etc. After the experiment, the author uses SPSS to analyze collected data and make a comparison. The results show that students' English reading anxiety level of EC is lower than that of CC after the experiment. In addition, compared with students of CC, students of EC have made greater progress in the post-test. Therefore, this research manifests that senior high school students do have different levels of English reading anxiety and scaffolding instruction is an effective teaching method in alleviating students' English reading anxiety; along with English reading anxiety alleviated, students' English reading achievement can be improved.In conclusion, this research has thrown new light on the application of scaffolding instruction to alleviate students' English reading anxiety in senior high school. According to the findings of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that scaffolding instruction can not only alleviate students' reading anxiety effectively but also improve their reading achievement significantly. Thus, scaffolding instruction can be applied to English reading teaching of senior high school to help students solve this psychological problem. However, due to the author's limited knowledge and ability, there still exists some problems in this research. It needs to have further investigation of relevant research. In the end of the paper, the author offers some suggestions for English reading teaching and the future research.