An Empirical Study On Scaffolding Instruction Supported By Mind Mapping In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

English reading is one of the four basic English language skills and an important part of English teaching in senior high schools.Nowadays,there are still many problems in English reading teaching in senior high schools.Most senior high school English teachers still adopt traditional teaching methods.Teachers are the center of English teaching,and students are more passive in the learning process.Senior high school students have poor ability of autonomous learning,and their acquisition of knowledge mainly depends on teachers’ explanations in class.Their English reading achievement is not high.Scaffolding instruction is an important teaching method,which occurs in the area of students’ zone of proximal development.It uses scaffolds and contexts to enable students to plan,implement and accomplish their study.At the same time,as an intuitive way to be seen by students,the mind mapping could enhance students’ memory,vision and originality.The mind mapping in this research is the important support for scaffolding instruction.It is interspersed in each stage of scaffolding instruction and plays a role with various types of scaffolds provided by teachers.It gradually changes from inspiring students to guiding students to understand the logic and details of reading materials,which affect high school students’ English reading level and autonomous learning ability.The research of scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping has practical significance for English reading teaching in senior high schools.Based on the present situation of English reading teaching in senior high schools,this study will discuss the following questions:1.What effect does the scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping have on students’ reading achievement?2.What effect does the scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping have on students’ autonomous learning ability?3.What effect does the scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping have on different dimensions of students’ autonomous learning ability?This empirical study takes 80 students from two classes in a middle school in Xi’an as experimental subjects.Class A is the experimental class,and Class B is the control class.The experimental time is three months.In this study,scales,test papers were used for experimental testing,and SPSS was used for statistical analysis of experimental data.In order to make this study more convincing,the author randomly selected 9 students from the experimental class and interviewed them.This study concludes the following conclusions:1.Scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping can help high school students to improve their reading achievement.The students in the experimental class can use scaffolding to study the text in the English reading class,draw mind maps to sort out the ideas of the article,and eliminate their problems through group discussions.2.Scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping can help high school students to improve their autonomous learning ability.In the experimental class guided by scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping,the teacher pays great attention to guiding students to develop their good habits such as drawing mind maps and group discussions,thus affecting their autonomous learning ability.3.Scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping has different effects on different dimensions of high school students’ autonomous learning ability.Scaffolding instruction enables students to master some reading skills.Drawing mind maps requires students to have a systematic grasp of the previous knowledge and to summarize the learned content more often.At the same time,students also received the evaluation of classroom performance and mind mapping from many aspects.After the experiment,students’ reading achievement has been improved significantly,and there is a positive correlation between academic performance and self-efficacy.Therefore,students in the experimental class have significantly improved their learning responsibility,motivation and self-efficacy,ability to apply learning strategies and assessment of learning process.Meanwhile the scaffolding instruction supported by mind mapping does not have much influence on the students’ learning attitude,the planning of learning,the monitoring of their own learning,the management of learning resources and the prediction of their academic performance.