A Study Of The Impact Of Scaffolding Instruction On Senior High School Students English Reading Competence

Reading plays an extremely important role in senior high school English.The National Curriculum Standard for Senior High School English Teaching(The Ministry of Education)also states that the objectives of English teaching are to stimulate students' interest in reading,help them form good reading habits and develop effective reading strategies,leading them to learn autonomously.This paper attempts to apply scaffolding instruction to English reading in senior high school and discuss the influence of scaffolding instruction on senior high school students' English reading ability.Scaffolding instruction,which is based on the concept of constructivism and the theory of the zone of proximal development,adheres to the idea of “taking learners as the center and focusing on the cultivation of students' independent learning ability”.In the teaching process,this teaching method mainly builds a set of specific auxiliary frameworks for students,helps students to explore independently with the help of specific situations and finally finishes the construction of knowledge.So,the teacher uses various teaching methods according to the students' mastery of knowledge,takes effective measures to reduce the tasks in the reading process and provides scaffolds for students timely to improve their English reading ability.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:1)What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on senior high school students' reading proficiency?2)What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on senior high school students' reading strategies?3)In what ways does scaffolding instruction have an effect on senior high school students' independent reading learning?107 students from two classes in grade 2 in a senior high school in Yuncheng,Shanxi Province,are selected as the research subjects.53 students are in the experiment class and there are 54 students in the control class.Scaffolding instruction is used in the experiment class while the traditional teaching method is used in the control class.This study lasts for 16 weeks.Before the experiment,the students have similar English proficiency.Research instruments include pre-test and post-test,questionnaire and interview and SPSS 22.0 is used to analyze the collected data.It is found that after the experiment,the students in the experiment class performed significantly better than those in the control class.The students in experiment class improve their reading comprehension dramatically.At the same time,scaffolding instruction is helpful for students to form effective learning strategies and gradually cultivate students' independent reading ability.Therefore,the scaffolding instruction is feasible in senior high school students' English reading teaching.