A Study On The Application Of The Scaffolding Instruction To English Listening Teaching In Senior High School

As one of the basic language skills,listening plays an important role in the development of learner’s language competence.However,the current situation of listening teaching in senior high schools is not as good as it could be.Most senior high school teachers tend to focus on teaching grammar and new words in the listening activities,and generally adopt the traditional listening teaching method,which is teacher-centered,textbook-centered,and grammar-centered.This traditional English teaching method not only makes students’ lose interest in English listening,but also leads to their anxiety and fear of English listening comprehension.Many scholars and teachers have made many attempts to change this status of English listening teaching.Scaffolding instruction is a student-oriented teaching method based on Constructivism and Zone of Proximal Development.It gives full play to students’ initiative and creativity in the process of constructing their knowledge and improving their abilities.The basic concept of scaffolding instruction is that teachers should provide students with timely and appropriate scaffolding to guide students in independent exploration and cooperative learning with the aim of helping students acquire knowledge and skills.Many scholars have done a lot of researches to prove that scaffolding instruction is effective in many areas,especially in the field of foreign language teaching.However,there are not many empirical studies on the application of scaffolding instruction to English listening teaching in senior high school.Based on previous studies,the author applies the scaffolding instruction to senior high school English listening teaching with the purpose of answering the following questions:(1)What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on senior high school students’ English listening anxiety?(2)What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on senior high school students’ listening performance?(3)What are the students’ attitudes toward scaffolding instruction?The author selects 142 students in two parallel classes of a senior high school in Hebei Province as the research subjects.The traditional listening teaching method is used in CC,while the scaffolding instruction is adopted in EC.The teaching experiment lasts for three months from September 2020 to January 2021.A questionnaire and two tests are designed to collect data before and after the teaching experiment,and the collected data are entered into the software of SPSS 23.0 for analysis to compare the changes in English listening anxiety and listening performance of the students.After the teaching experiment,the author randomly chooses nine students from EC to participate in a semi-structured interview to investigate their attitudes and suggestions about scaffolding instruction.Based on the analysis of the collected data,three conclusions are drawn as follows:(1)Scaffolding instruction is conducive to reducing senior high school students’ English listening anxiety.According to the comparison between the pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire in EC,the students’ overall English listening anxiety level as well as the three dimensions of English listening anxiety,namely LA,SB,and DS,all have decreased significantly,which indicates that the scaffolding instruction can reduce senior high school students’ English listening anxiety.According to the interview,EC students point out that the reasons for the reduction of their English listening anxiety are the useful background information,the relaxing classroom atmosphere and their confidence in listening comprehension.(2)Scaffolding instruction can help senior high school students improve their English listening performance.According to the results of post-test in CC and EC,the mean of EC is 2.0916 higher than CC.According to the comparison between the pre-test and post-test in EC,the mean of the listening test improves by 2.2817.In terms of the results of the Independent Sample Test and the Paired Sample Test,both the values of Sig.(2-tailed)are 0.000(p<0.05),which indicates that the listening performance of EC improves significantly.According to the interview,EC students hold that the reasons for the improvement of listening performance are their interest in listening,the background information provided by the teacher,and the listening strategies.(3)Students prefer the scaffolding instruction to the traditional listening teaching method.However,they also think that the scaffolding instruction have some disadvantages and give some suggestions on further implementing it.