An Experimental Study Of Scaffolding Instruction In Senior High School English Literature Reading

The term Scaffolding was first introduced by Bruno to the educational domain in 1976,and then developed by Lev Vygotsky for the first time in education with the concept and theory of “Proximal Development Zone(ZDP)”.Scaffolding is a metaphor for the interaction happening between an expert and a novice engaged in a problem-solving task or the adult’s controlling the elements of a task beyond the learner’s capability.Scaffolding Instruction is widely adopted in the teaching of English reading,mainly focusing on how to stimulate students’ interest in English reading and improve reading abilities,or exploring how college students learn English in terms of teachers’ classroom discourse.Little research,which is specifically on Scaffolding for middle school students’ reading English literary works can be found at present.After the adoption of the continuation task in the new College Entrance Examination,which requires students to complete a story by giving half of the story and two sentences of the continued part,English literary work reading has received more attention,as the passages in the previous exams were narratives,mostly stories.However,English literature works(specifically English novels in this present study)are not only a language learning material,but also a carrier of ideas,which makes it difficult to digest.As a result,most students have a shallow understanding of literary works,let alone take in the essence of them.Therefore,it is necessary to adopt the method of “independent reading” and “appropriate guidance”.Scaffolds are needed in reading English literary works.In order to see whether reading English literary works can help students better improve their performance in the continuation task,the researcher conducted Scaffolding Instruction in the classroom by providing scaffolding for reading(questions,reminders,cues,etc.)and scaffolding for writing(micro-skills,imitations,etc.)This research adopts an experimental research method to answer the following two questions:1.What effect does the Scaffolding Instruction for reading English literary works have on students’ performance in the continuation task?2.In what aspects does the teacher’s Scaffolding Instruction influence students’ performance in the continuation task?The participants of the study were two parallel classes in Grade Two of a high school in Longyou County,Zhejiang Province,with 43 students respectively in each class.The experiment lasted an entire semester,from September 5,2021 to January 29,2022.The researcher first summarized the main problems in students’ continuation writings,then chose the English novel Charlotte’s Web,which is considered as an ideal reading material for the continuation task.The researcher designed learning guides to provide both scaffolding for understanding the novel and scaffolding for improving their writings.In the control class,the teacher conducted the continuation task teaching in a traditional way,i.e.analyzing the given texts,predicting the ending,creating plots and details,and beautifying the language.It took place on a weekly basis.At the end of the semester,the researcher compared the students’ scores of their continuation tasks in the two exams(at the beginning of and the end of the semester),and used the Independent Samples T-Test to compare the average scores of the control class and the experimental class after the experiment.Paired Samples T-Test was used to compare the average scores of the experimental class in the two exams.After that,the researcher carried out “A Questionnaire Survey on Charlotte’s Web Reading Effect",and used SPSS to carry out the Multiple Linear Regression Analysis on the data.After the experiment,the researcher randomly selected from the two classes,several compositions of students with different English proficiency to see whether their performance in the continuation task was improved and,if so,in what aspects is the improvement influenced by the teacher’s Scaffolding Instruction.The conclusions of this research are as follows:1.The teacher’s scaffolding in reading English literary works improves students’ performance in the continuation task.2.Students’ performance in the continuation task is improved in terms of the logic of the storyline,theme transmission,vocabulary richness and language accuracy.This study has implications both for the teaching and curriculum construction of English literature reading,as well as the teaching of the continuation task.However,many factors contributed to the results,the difficulty of examination questions,the students’ receptivity,and the differences in teachers’ rating.To what extent are the research results affected by the above factors? Does the provision of scaffolding limit students’ thinking? These are problems that cannot be solved in this study,and thus,are also implications for future research.