A Study On Peer Scaffolding In English Class Group Interaction In Senior High Schools

The general goal of English in senior high schools attempts to clarify the purpose of English learning on the basis of compulsory English education,then develop students’ abilities of autonomous learning and cooperative learning,form effective learning strategies and cultivate students’ skills of comprehensive language.Realizing this goal not only connects with the help from the teachers,but also depends on the autonomous learning and cooperative learning of the students.The cooperative learning of the students has been proved to be effective in recent years.Based on the students,with the guidance of the teachers,cooperative learning gives students more time to get the ability they need by discussing.During discussing,the peer comes to be an important resource of learning,and we are supposed to take full advantage of this resource.Besides,we should pay attention to the peer scaffolding.As a new research field,the peer scaffolding contains important value for us to study.However,the study at this aspect is quite few until now.The purpose of this study is to get some effective ways to improve the theoretical system,and help the teachers start to pay attention to the peer scaffolding.This study was conducted at a senior high school in Linfen.The research adopted questionnaire to survey 768 students in 16 classes in grade 2.The questionnaire survey aims to explore the status quo of students’ understanding to peer scaffolding in the group interaction of the English class in senior high school.Then the author adopted classroom observation,and chose a key class and a regular class from the 16 classes to make recordings.According to the scaffolding classification of associate professor Li Danli from Wuhan university,the author identified the peer scaffolding,then adopted the conversation analysis method to make statistics of peer scaffolding frequency from the recording dialogue materials,analyzed the distribution of peer scaffolding in the two different classes(the key class and the regular class),and then explored whether the peer scaffolding frequency was different between the key class and the regular class.After that,the author analyzed the specific effects of peer scaffolding to students’ English learning in classes and the problems existed in the practice.To get proper conclusions and find the solutions,this research will try to study the following questions:1.What’s the status quo of students’ understanding to peer scaffolding in English class group interaction in senior high schools?2.What’s the general distribution of peer scaffolding in English class group interaction in senior high schools? Whether the distribution in the key class and in the regular class is different?3.What are specific effects of peer scaffolding to students’ English learning in English class group interaction in senior high schools?By analyzing the three research questions above,the author draws the following conclusions:Students think that they often use peer scaffolding in English classes and most of the students insist that their peers will provide help to them when they are in trouble.This means that peer scaffolding exists universally in English class group interaction in senior high schools.Peer scaffolding exists both in the key class and the regular class.By analyzing the rank,the author finds the distribution of each peer scaffolding in the regular class and the key class is different.In the key class,the ranking is feedback,demonstration,recruitment,marking critical feature,simplifying the task,direction maintaining and frustration control.In the regular class,the ranking is demonstration,recruitment,feedback,direction maintaining,marking critical feature,simplifying the task and frustration control.Students learn mainly through feedback,demonstration and recruitment to build scaffolding,and focus on the form and discuss the meaning.They pay attention to the differences between English and Chinese,and monitor the effect of self-output and other-output.To some extent,peer scaffolding(recruitment,simplifying the task,direction maintaining,feedback,demonstration,marking critical feature and frustration control)plays different roles for students’ English learning.Although students think their peer is of great significance to their English learning,actual situation of peer scaffolding exists some problems.First,because of students’ limited abilities of self-control and knowledge,students sometimes output wrong grammar,sometimes are absent-mind or off topic.Second,the usage of the peer scaffolding is for the examination,but not for the improvement of students’ study skills.Third,peer scaffolding is used in a single way.Forth,the function of each peer scaffolding can’t be fully developed because of the teachers’ poor understanding.Fifth,the teachers’ teaching tasks rarely refer to the student’s ZDP etc.This study is carried out freely,without any experimental intervention.The authoraims at providing some inspiration for the group interaction teaching in English class in senior high school.