Research On Application Of Scaffolding Teaching Theory In Online Elementary Oral Chinese Class

The Chinese listening and speaking class aims at developing students’ Chinese listening and speaking abilities to communicate in Chinese.During my teaching practicum in Thailand,I found that a large number of native Thai teachers and volunteer Chinese teachers were using the Direct Translation Method in their Listening and Speaking classes.Teachers mainly focus on inputting pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar,then require students to do drill practice.Such teaching mode tends to reduce students’ interest in learning oral Chinese and impede students’ oral Chinese development.Besides,this can keep students staying on the phase of imitating,and heavily rely on the teachers,which makes it difficult for learners to reach the level of doing fluent social communication in Chinese.In addition,the Direct Translation Mode also lacks the cultivation and guidance of student’s independent learning ability which is of vital importance for their future study.In recent years,the Scaffolding Teaching Theory has attracted the attention of domestic teachers and increasing number of teachers have applied the theory into teaching practice.In contrast,practical teaching research on the application of Scaffolding Teaching Theory to teaching Chinese as a foreign language is relatively less.In this dissertation,we apply Scaffolding Teaching Theory into oral Chinese teaching to explore its feasibility and applicability in the Listening and Speaking class for Thai high school students majoring in Chinese.With the pandemic backdrop in 2020-2021,online teaching has become the first choice for most schools around the world.The author contacted a Chinese teacher Mrs.Nawara from Suanboonyopatham Lamphun School in Thailand,where the author was once an intern Chinese teacher,and carried out the online teaching research with her assistance.The author designs three lessons of online speaking practice based on Scaffolding Teaching Theory.Scaffolding comes first,followed by scaffolding fading and totally removing,including all the aspects of phonetics,vocabulary,grammar and discourse output,to make a new attempt to teach Chinese speaking in Suanboonyopatham Lamphun School.In this dissertation,the methods we utilize including pre-tests for assessing students’ Zone of Proximal Development;online class recordings;students’ corpus transcription analysis and immediate post-class interviews.Furthermore,we also combed through and reviewed the teaching sections of these elementary online speaking lessons.It turns out that students gradually adapt to the teaching mode shift and show more enthusiasm for speaking and using Chinese.The length of their sentence output has increased significantly,and the advantages of Scaffolding Teaching have been reflected.The innovation of this research lies in the application of the Scaffolding Teaching Theory to the online oral Chinese teaching as a foreign language.With the help of teacher’s scaffolding construction,students are able to learn and explore effectively in their Zone of Proximal Development,which improves the students’ Chinese communicative competence and Higher-order thinking skills.This is a new attempt in the online oral Chinese teaching class.In addition,the author also has the opportunity to attend the online class taught by a native Thai Chinese teacher in the Thai school,through which the author is able to conduct a closer online classroom observation and comparison,to figure out the students’ and local teachers’ demands and feedback on the Chinese Listening and Speaking classes.Based on this,the author can reflect on and adjust the teaching design,so as to provide some reference value for future online oral Chinese classes.