The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction Model In College Oral English Teacbing

Speaking is one of the basic skills among listening, speaking, reading, and writing, which isa very important aspect to evaluate English learners’ comprehensive abilities in language use. However, the English speaking has continuously been an important and difficult skill to improvein English learning. Especially, to non-English major students, even many doctoral graduatescould not obtain the ability to communicate smoothly in oral English. In China, as a result oflacking of the atmosphere of studying English, how to develop English learners’ oral Englishability has become a problem to be solved urgently. This is an empirical study trying to test theeffectiveness of scaffolding instruction model by applying it to oral English teaching process toChinese college non-English majors, and improve students’ oral English ability.The teaching experiment for whole academic semester was conducted (Sep.,2011to Jan.,2012). The subjects involved in this study are86students of two parallel classes majoring inMath which were randomly chosen in a key university in Shandong province. And thisempirical study aims to testify whether scaffolding instruction model is an effective way toimprove students’ ability in speaking, then examine students’ attitudes towards scaffoldinginstruction model, and last construct a concrete scaffolding instruction model. The teaching taskis to complete speaking topic relevant to the texts of every unit in the whole teaching material.The experimental group was taught with the scaffolding instruction model, while the controlgroup was taught with the traditional teaching method (3Ps). Data were collected from the pre-and post-test of oral English at the beginning and the end of the experiment and a mini-surveyafter the experiment of the two groups. Qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis wereemployed in this study. Firstly all data analyses in this study were performed by using SPSS13.0. Qualitative analysis was done to compare the scores of pre-test and post-test of twoclasses and to examine the extent of students’ progress. And then, generalization, classificationand descriptive analysis of students’ answers to the survey questions was conducted withqualitative analysis, to examine students’ attitude towards the effects of the scaffoldinginstruction model to oral English teaching.The statistical results of the study reveal that the experimental class made more progressthan the control class in post-test: the total mean score of the experimental class is9.687(thetotal15), and increase1.651compared to the pre-test; while, the mean score of the control classis8.036, with an increase of0.262. The results of the survey indicate that students ofexperimental class have a positive attitude towards the model, and express that they benefit inmany aspects that the scaffolding instruction model can mobilize students’ interest and enthusiasm, encourage students to actively use their brains, fully exploit their potential to learnand improve their self-learning ability and English comprehensive ability. These resultsdemonstrate that the advantage of the scaffolding instruction model in helping Chinesenon-English majors improve their oral English ability. And scaffolding instruction model haspositive guidance to improve students’ oral English ability which has enlightenment functionfor non-English major students’ oral English teaching. Therefore, scaffolding oral Englishinstruction model is more effective to help students improve spoken English proficiency andpractical communicative ability than the traditional oral English teaching method.Obviously, this thesis is still far from perfect, such as a short period of the experiment, asmall group of students and the participants are from the same university. Nevertheless, the studybasically achieved the expected goals, which not only reflect the feasibility and practicability ofscaffolding instruction model in oral English teaching but also provide constructive suggestionsfor the future practice, and inject new ideas into the development of theoretical research of oralEnglish teaching and learning.