An Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Non-english Majors’ English Reading Based On Constructivism

Reading is an important way for us to obtain information and improve the comprehensive language ability.It plays an important role in listening,speaking,reading and writing.Therefore,it is the central task and important part of College English reading teaching to strengthen reading teaching,stimulate students’ English reading interest and improve their scores.At present,College English teaching is still using the traditional teaching model which is teacher-centered,textbook-centered and grammar-centered.Under this teaching model,students are passive learners,which may lead to a series of problems.Therefore,how to effectively improve students’ English reading level and renew the traditional English reading teaching methods have become an important task in College English reading teaching.As one of the foreign language teaching theories,scaffolding instruction has been highly valued both in theory and practice and has become an important area of research in foreign language teaching.The application of scaffolding instruction in reading is a new trend in the current teaching of reading and can effectively make-up for the shortcomings of the traditional reading teaching methods.This teaching model is the specific application of “zone of proximal development theory” and “constructivism theory” in English reading teaching and has attracted the attention of many scholars at home and abroad.Compared with the research abroad,the amount of empirical research on scaffolding reading teaching in China is relatively small,especially with the teaching non-English majors.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct in-depth research using scaffolding instruction for stimulating students’ interests in English reading and improving reading ability,as well as improving the effect of teachers’ reading teaching.On the basis of previous studies,the author will apply scaffolding instruction to College English reading teaching for non-English majors,and verify whether scaffolding teaching can stimulate college students’ reading interests and improve reading scores.Therefore,this study aims to answer the following two questions:1.Can the application of scaffolding instruction stimulate non-English majors’ interests in English reading?2.Can the application of scaffolding instruction improve non-English majors’ English reading scores?In this study,the experiment chose some freshmen of non-English major as the research subjects,who are from two parallel classes of the Northwest Minzu University.The two classes were taught with the same teaching materials by the same teacher,and the length of teaching time were the same.But the teaching model of the two classes were different.The control class adopted the traditional English reading teaching,while the experimental class applied the scaffolding instruction.At the end of the experiment,all the data collected were analyzed by SPSS.25.0 to test the effectiveness of scaffolding instruction in College English reading teaching.After a semester of teaching experiment,according to the results of the tests,the English reading scores of the experimental class was significantly higher than that of the controlled class.From the results of questionnaire and interview of the two classes,we can draw the conclusion that scaffolding instruction can stimulate students’ interest in English reading and improve their English reading scores.