A Study Of Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Word is a basic unit of language. Mastering enough vocabulary is the premise of improving the students’ abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. In 2003, a new curriculum standard issued which set up a higher requirement to the senior high school students about English vocabulary. Therefore, English vocabulary teaching is becoming more and more important in English teaching. However, there are still some problems in vocabulary teaching, the traditional vocabulary teaching methods cannot meet the needs of modern educational goals. In order to improve the situation of senior high school English vocabulary teaching and find out a scientific and feasible teaching method, the author tries to apply the scaffolding instruction to the vocabulary teaching in senior high school English class.The scaffolding instruction is a teaching method which the teachers provide a conceptual framework for students to construct knowledge. The conceptual framework plays a role of scaffolding which can help the students to get a further understanding of the learning problems. It is a process of gradually transferring learning responsibility from teachers to learners with the teachers’ support and then removing the support completely.This study is based on the Constructivism theory and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The author takes 106 students as the experiment subjects who are from Class Four and Class Five in Grade One of Dawa Senior High School in Liaoning, Panjin. The author makes a comparison analysis of the data both from the application of scaffolding instruction and from the traditional teaching to the vocabulary teaching, aiming to explore the effect of the scaffolding instruction on the students’ learning interest; students’ attitudes to the scaffolding instruction and effect of scaffolding instruction on vocabulary learning.The experiment lasts for three months which is from September 2014 to November 2014. The experimental class and the control class are taught by the same teacher and by using the same materials. However, the author adopted scaffolding instruction in the experimental class and traditional teaching method in the control class. The instruments of the research are pre-test, post-test, pre-questionnaire, post-questionnaire and interview.The results proved that scaffolding instruction can make effective contribution to improving the learners’ English vocabulary. Scaffolding instruction can improve students’ vocabulary score and stimulate their learning interest. Most learners show positive attitudes towards the scaffolding instruction. At last, the author discussed the major findings of the research, implications, limitations of the study and suggestions for future studies. The author hopes that the results of this study can provide some reference for future studies on scaffolding instruction in China.