A Research On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Listening Class In Junior High Schools

Scaffolding Instruction has been broadly applied to reading and writing,but the research on listening teaching is still rare.Therefore,this research applied it to English listening teaching in junior high school to address three questions as follows:(1)What are the changes in students‘ anxiety,motivation,listening proficiency,and attitudes towards English class after Scaffolding Instructional experiment?(2)Which group makes greater progress under the Scaffolding Instruction,high-score group or low-score group?(3)What are the problems with the application of Scaffolding Instruction?This experiment is a practical study of junior high school English listening conducted in Youai South Road School in Nanning.Two seventh-grade classes with a similar level of listening were selected as experimental subjects,and a three-month experiment was conducted.Both classes were taught by the author,maintaining the same progress and using the same textbook,but the EC adopted Scaffolding Instruction,while the CC adopted the traditional teaching method.The research instruments are questionnaire,test,interview and experiment.Finally data and results are analyzed through Excel 2003 analysis and descriptive statistical SPSS 22.0 on experimental data,as well as the interview analysis.The results show that:(1)After the Scaffolding Instruction experiment,students‘ performance in the four dimensions has changed obviously.Among them,24% of the students‘ internal motivation was stimulated and 23% of the students‘ anxiety in the listening class was reduced,and finally,the change of attitudes to the listening class and the improvement of listening proficiency has increased by 15% and 12% respectively.(2)After the Scaffolding Instruction experiment,the mean score of the low-score group was 2.18 higher than that of the high-score group,and the mean score of EC was 2.25 higher than that of EC,which demonstrates that Scaffolding Instruction can improve students‘ listening ability,especially the low-score group.(3)There are some problems in the application of Scaffolding Instruction to English listening class,such as the long time of scaffolding activities,insufficient types of scaffolds used by teachers,and the changing of students‘ ZPD with the deepening of learning.According to the research results,this paper puts forward some suggestions about how to improve students‘ listening proficiency at different levels by using Scaffolding Instruction.(1)Teachers should create a real learning situation with all kinds of resources according to the psychological needs of students,so as to stimulate students‘ internal motivation.(2)Teachers should bear the responsibility for the different language levels of students,provide scaffolding which in conjunction with students‘ ZPD,and improve the effective of classroom teaching.(3)Teachers should strictly control the time and rhythm of teaching activities,use a wide variety of scaffolds,and update the teaching plan with the changed of students‘ ZPD.This thesis proves the effectiveness of Scaffolding Instruction in English listening class,and points out the limitations of the research and the direction for future research.It will help different levels of students to improve their listening proficiency,and help teachers to have a new understanding of listening teaching so as to adapt to the new situation of English teaching in China.