An Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Reading Teaching At Technical Secondary Vocational School

With the development of economic globalization,English reading plays a more and more important role in the communication.It’s an important task to improve the students’ English reading comprehension during the English teaching process.However,there are still some problems during English reading teaching at technical secondary vocational school in our country.Traditional teaching method focuses on teachers’ teaching and neglect the cultivation of students’ autonomous learning ability.As a result,students lack interests in learning English.On the other hand,their English is very poor and they can hardly complete the reading task by themselves.Therefore,we attempt to introduce the scaffolding instruction to technical secondary vocational English reading teaching to arouse students’ interest in English reading,and provide them some help to improve their English reading comprehension.The scaffolding instruction is a kind of teaching pattern,which is based on Constructivism Theory,Zone of Proximal Development Theory and Social Interaction Theory.With the aid of real situation,independent exploration,cooperative learning and discussion and the effective evaluation,the teacher provides the suitable scaffoldings for learners,gradually transfers the learning task to learners,and finally removes the scaffoldings.The teacher is a helper,an assistant,a facilitator and a manager of the study activities in students’ learning process.And the teacher should lead the students to participate in the learning process,try to stimulate students’ interest and cultivate their self-learning ability.The study uses experimental method.The purpose of this study is to explore whether scaffolding instruction can help the teachers to improve their English reading teaching effect or not.There are two research questions:1.Can scaffolding instruction arouse students’ interest in English reading?2.Can scaffolding instruction improve students’ English reading comprehension?Two intermediate classes of Grade One from a technical secondary vocational school of Changyi Weifang were selected as control class and experiment class.The teacher used scaffolding instruction at experiment class and PWP teaching model at control class.The experiment lasted 3 months.The author collected data by the means of tests and questionnaires and analyzed data by using SPSS25.0 to study the effect of scaffolding instruction in English reading teaching classes at technical secondary vocational school.The author conducted questionnaire survey before and after the experiment.And the English reading comprehension tests were carried out before and after the experiment.The quantitative analysis of the questionnaire survey result shows that the students’ interest in English reading of experiment class is much greater than that of control class after the experiment.And the students’ English reading comprehension of experiment class is stronger than that of control class.The data of independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test shows that reading comprehension of experiment class is obviously improved.The results indicate that scaffolding instruction is helpful to arouse the students’ reading interest and improve their English reading comprehension.