A Study Of English Distance Education For Adult Learners Based On Scaffolding Theory

The rapid development of internet technology has brought many changes in dailylife. In educational area, distance education is the product of continuous technologicaldevelopment. Distance education, as a totally new way of instruction, leads a series ofinnovations of teaching. It is typically characterized by the following three points：computers as teaching tools，internet as a communicating path, teachers and studentsinvolved in education in different places during the same period of time. Due toflexible selectivity of time and place, distance education offers learning opportunitiesfor people who cannot attend in traditional schools because of some disturbing factorsfrom their families or jobs. Nowadays, more and more scholars start to show theirinterest in distance education. Their research achievements have made the system ofdistance education more and more normative. Most of the results on distanceeducation try to answer whether traditional teaching theories can effectively instructdistance teaching mode，if they can, how to utilize the theories and whether theyshould be modified in some degree after being introduced into distance education?Scaffolding theory, originated from Vygosky‘S ZPD (zone of proximaldevelopment) theory, is an important component of constructivism. Since the conceptof scaffolding was employed in1970s, it has aroused intense and active reaction inthe area of foreign language teaching. Under the instruction of scaffolding theory, therelationship between the teacher and students changes greatly and the roles of teachersare enriched. This theory refers to the requirements both for the teacher and thestudents. The teacher should just assist the students to achieve their learning goal, andthe students should realize the understanding and digestion of knowledge points bytheir own. Nowadays, scaffolding theory has been introduced into distanceeducational environment. The separation of teaching and learning decreases theteacher‘s control of his or her students. Thus, self-regulated and self-learning abilitiesof students are more important in distance education. Does it mean applyingscaffolding theory to instruct distance education will be effective? This thesis tries to investigate the teaching effect of distance education based onscaffolding theory. Taking Shanghai Hiknow Company as an example, the researcherchose100students of Hiknow as research subjects.70of the participants did thequestionnaires and30of them received interviews, and then the researcher picked up40students according to some rules to take quizzes. Through reviewing literatures,doing questionnaires and interviews and arranging quizzes, the researcher collectedrelated resources and data. The work of designing questionnaires and quizzes receivedprofessional instruction. To ensure validity and reliability of the experiment, theprocess of the experiment was monitored. The researcher tries to testify twohypotheses:(1) scaffolding theory is applicable to the course teaching;(2) scaffoldingtheory is applicable to the English teaching for adults in distance education. Theresults show that:(1) if the students are taught in some scaffolding ways, they feel iteasier to understand knowledge points and form long-term memory; at the same time,students are more willing to advise their teachers to use scaffolding theory;(2) thestudents who receive higher scores come from classes in which scaffolding theory isutilized, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of using scaffolding in distanceEnglish education for adults.