The Effects Of Scaffolding Instruction On Junior High School Students' English Listening Comprehension Performance And Learning Autonomy

In daily communication and language learning,English listening is not only a channel to acquire information,but also the foundation for developing other language skills.However,in reality,for many junior high school students,attending listening class means to have listening test rather than to get learning instruction and guidance.And outside the classroom,they cannot take advantage of the rich English listening materials due to the poor learning autonomy.Scaffolding instruction proposes to facilitate students',learning by providing suitable scaffolds to connect their prior knowledge with the new information and to complete the learning tasks themselves,so the objective of scaffolding instruction application is to educate independent learners with learning autonomy.For this reason,this thesis chooses the scaffolding instruction to test and discuss the effects of this method on the junior high school students'English listening performance and learning autonomy.The author raised three research questions.1.What are the effects of scaffolding instruction on students'English listening comprehension performance?2.How does scaffolding instruction affect English listening performance of students with different listening ability levels?3.What are the effects of scaffolding instruction on students'learning autonomy in listening?The author chose two grade-nine classes in Shenzhen with 44 students in experimental class and 43 students in the control class respectively as subjects to carry out this sixteen-week research.For the first research question,the author adopted both the quantitative and qualitative methods.The two classes are found to be two parallel classes through the pretest.After that,the author applied scaffolding instruction in the experimental class while using the traditional teaching method in the control class.After the experiment,the author conducted the post-test in the two classes by using the same English listening test,and then examined whether there were significant differences between tests by SPSS 20.0.Besides,in order to further understand how scaffolding instruction influences students' English listening performance in terms of different question types of examination question,the author took the multiple choice questions and blank-filling questions that are majorly used in this experiment to find out whether there are significant differences between them by SPSS 20.0.For the second research question,based on their performance in the pretest,the author divided 12 students from the experimental class into three groups,namely the high level,medium level and low level group respectively for semi-constructed interview to understand their opinions about how scaffolding instruction affected their English listening performance.For the last research question,the author adopted the semi-constructed interview to select the students'perspective on the effects of scaffolding instruction on the different components of English learning autonomy.Finally,the data collected from the experiment manifested that there was a significant difference between experimental class and control class in the result of post-test with p=0.048<0.05,besides,comparing the control class's mean score dropped nearly 2 points,experimental class's improved a lot,proving scaffolding instruction is more effective than traditional teaching method on English listening scores improvement.What's more,the data showed that both blank-filling questions and multiple choice questions showed significant differences between the pretest and post-test with p=0.000<0.05,p=0.002<0.05.However,the improved degree of the mean scores of blank-filling questions and multiple choice questions is different,9 points and 3 points respectively,suggesting scaffolding instruction may affect different question types differently,and scaffolding instruction has better performance in blank-filling question than multiple choice question.For the second research question,most students in different listening levels thought scaffolding instruction positively affected their English listening performance in different aspects.For the last research question,students also gave the positive feedback for scaffolding instruction in terms of the four components of learning autonomy.