The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is the foundation of language learning.Mastering enough vocabulary is the precondition for improving students’ abilities on listening,speaking,reading and writing.The New Senior English Curriculum Standard(2011)set up a higher requirement to the senior high school students that they have to acquire about 3,500 words,and 400 to 500 idioms and phrases.Therefore,vocabulary teaching and learning of senior high school should get more attention than before.However,there are many problems of the current vocabulary teaching and learning,and these problems impede students to achieve the requirement of The New Senior English Curriculum Standard,and students’ level could not satisfy the English teaching demands of the current society.Therefore,in order to improve this kind of situation,this research applies scaffolding instruction in vocabulary teaching to arouse students’ interests toward vocabulary learning and cultivate their vocabulary learning strategies.Scaffolding instruction is a new teaching mode based on the Constructivism and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development which can help students construct knowledge framework,and scaffolding instruction is the bridge to connect the students’ already-known knowledge with the new knowledge to guide students to master knowledge systematically.Compared with traditional teaching modes,scaffolding instruction is a student-oriented mode that requires teachers to teach in accordance with the ZPD of students,and lead students to enter the learning situation to complete the learning content.With the completion of learning tasks,the scaffolds would be withdrawing gradually.Therefore,compared with the traditional teaching method scaffolding instruction has many advantages,like promoting students’ learning motivation,and creating better learning condition,etc.The author conducts the research so as to test the feasibility and effectiveness of scaffolding instruction applying to English vocabulary teaching.The subjects of this research are the 104 students of two parallel classes,Class4 is randomly selected as experimental class(EC),and Class 3 as controlled class(CC),and 14 English teachers of Datong County No.2 Senior High School,and quantitative research and qualitative research have been used during the 16-week research.Before the experiment,questionnaire and interview are given to the students and teachers to investigate the current situation of vocabulary teaching andlearning.Meanwhile,the research uses SPSS 20.0 to do the Independent Sample T test to analyze the data of pre-test,which finds out that there is no significance difference between the two parallel classes.After the experiment,Paired Sample T test has been used to analyze the data of post-test.As scaffolding instruction are able to change students’ vocabulary learning methods and cultivate students’ vocabulary learning strategy and consciousness,the author uses pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire about vocabulary learning strategy and then analyzes the result by using SPSS 20.0 to do the Paired Sample T test.According to the results of the research,compared with the CC,the EC made great progress in vocabulary learning which clarifies that scaffolding instruction is able to improve students’ vocabulary learning scores.Compared the results of pre-questionnaire with that of post-questionnaire given to the EC,it is found out that scaffolding instruction can cultivate students’ vocabulary learning strategy effectively which enhances the efficiency of vocabulary learning.According to the above research,this thesis proposes several research implications.First of all,teachers should be adept in discovering the ZPD of students and building the scaffolds in accordance with the ZPD of students,which makes the teaching class more effective.Secondly,teachers need to collect various kinds of learning materials to satisfy students’ requirements.Thirdly,the procedures of scaffolding instruction should be correlated and progressive to make students obtain knowledge step by step.Fourthly,teachers should supply different types of scaffolds which accord with different teaching content to help students learn English passionately.Finally,according to the problems and limitations of the research,the author proposes several suggestions for further studies.