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Introduction
It is acknowledged that studying English is essential for the peopleall over the world. And the first step to learn English well is to masterEnglish vocabulary. Only mastering the vocabulary can learners improvenot only their listening, speaking, reading and writing competence butalso communicative competence. It is a key moment for students at thestage of junior high school to lay a good foundation of English. Therefore,how to master English vocabulary better is the key to learning Englishwell.In order to ensure that junior high school students can attain enoughvocabulary in three years, the Ministry of Education has defined thelexical level they should reach clearly. For example, the English Syllabusof Nine-year Compulsory Primary School requires that junior high schoolstudents need to master about 1500 words in three years. In addition, theJunior English Curriculum Standards which was revised in 2011 alsorequires that the English level of junior high school students shouldreach five. Level five means that students should not only learn to useabout 1600 words, but also use these words in the specific contextcorrectly. Thus, it is obvious that the state has attached much importanceon vocabulary learning of junior high schools.
However, from the current status of English teaching in junior highschools , the vocabulary is still the biggest difficulty in learning English.After entering junior high school, students have more subjects to learn,and the number and difficulty of words in English textbooks also increase.So some students begin to have difficulty in remembering words becausethey haven’t found the appropriate learning way. With less words theyhave mastered, taking English class begin to seem like listening to bibles,so they even start to hate English.According to the status quo of English vocabulary teaching in juniorhigh schools and the general goal of English curriculum, the scaffoldinginstruction will provide powerful help for students to learn Englishvocabulary. Scaffolding instruction is a teaching method developed on thebasis of constructivism and the zone of proximal development. It requiresteachers or other adults to help the students if they are in trouble duringthe process of learning. When the students have the ability to fulfill theirlearning goals, then remove the help. In this way, students can learn newknowledge on the basis of previous knowledge and with the help ofteachers or other adults. Therefore, they can not only consolidate theoriginal knowledge, but also master the new knowledge.
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Chapter One Literature Review
This empirical study is carried out for the sake of finding out thepotentially promotive effects of scaffolding instruction on Englishvocabulary teaching in junior high schools. In this empirical andexperimental study, scaffolding instruction will be conducted in theexperiment. And target items of this thesis are junior high school students'vocabulary learning interest, confidence and abilities. Therefore, thischapter is mainly divided into two parts. The first part deals with theprevious studies on the vocabulary teaching abroad and at home. Thesecond part mainly presents the relevant studies concerning scaffoldinginstruction.
1.1 Studies on English Vocabulary Teaching
Vocabulary is the foundation of all language activities. So theimportance of vocabulary teaching in the whole language teaching isself-evident. So scholars and teachers always pay great attention tovocabulary teaching. They have studied vocabulary from linguistictheories to vocabulary teaching methods, but there is still no fixedvocabulary teaching method.Communicative language teaching began to occupy a dominantposition from the 1970s. Lewis proposed a method of vocabularyteaching which based on English teaching. He believed that the core oflanguage education should be vocabulary teaching, and there is nodifference between syntax and grammar, that is they are inseparable.Vocabulary blocks exist on the basis of vocabulary and syntax and theexistence of these blocks are beneficial to the improvement of students'communicative competence.As for the input and output of vocabulary, Anglin mainly focused onvocabulary acquisition. He studied the differences between adults andchildren on the understanding of lexical meaning, and concluded someimportant characteristics about children’s vocabulary acquisition. Forexample, children are more likely to classify words by subject, whileadults like to classify them syntactically. And for children, the process ofunderstanding vocabulary is from specific to abstract, which is graduallygeneralized. Cater pointed out that vocabulary teaching should containtwo aspects, that is, comprehension and output. Comprehension meansthat words need to be taught in semantic context, so it is necessary to usecontext to guess the meaning of words. Output means the students’outputskills should be developed within discourse, so they are supposed to usethe input when having a conversation with others and allow the input turninto output.
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1.2 Studies on Scaffolding Instruction
Until now, a good deal of studies on scaffolding instruction havebeen carried out. This part firstly presents the development of scaffoldinginstruction abroad and secondly provides a review of the relevant studiesat home.Scaffolding Instruction is developed on the basis of zone of proximaldevelopment and constructivism. The notion of scaffold was firstproposed by the cognitive scientist Bruner in the late 1950s. It means thatlearners attain help from adults or peers who are more capable toaccomplish learning goals. “Help” in this situation is the “scaffold” tolearners. Thus, scaffolding instruction is a teaching method which enableslearners learn with the help of adults or other peers, so that their abilitiesare able to reach a higher level. A typical example of scaffoldinginstruction is that learners are provided with sufficient support at thebeginning of the learning process and then weaken it. Once the learnersare equipped with sufficient skills, gradually make them solve theproblems on their own. And scaffolding instruction is a method thatsupports learners and helps them solve problems, including providingclues, hints, encouragements, step-by-step solutions, studies on similarcases, or any other things that allow them to grow into independentlearners.
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Chapter Three Methodology.......... 29
3.1 Research Design....29
3.2 Research Procedure.......32
3.2.1ACase of Scaffolding Instruction........32
3.2.2 Data collection......35
3.2.3 DataAnalysis........36
Chapter Four Result and Discussion.....37
4.1 Effects of Scaffolding Instruction on Students’ Interests andConfidence...........37
4.2 Effects of Scaffolding Instruction on Students’Ability........46
Chapter Four Result and Discussion
This chapter offers detailed analysis of the qualitative data whichwere collected from pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire, as well asquantitative data from pretest and post-test. And some possibleexplanations and discussion about the results and findings are presentedafterwords.
4.1 Effects of Scaffolding Instruction on Students’ Interests and Confidence
In order to testify the effects of scaffolding instruction on students’interests and confidence, a pre-questionnaire (see Appendix I) is carriedout in these two groups and a post-questionnaire (see Appendix II) iscarried out only in experimental group.These two questionnaires are a kind of Likert Five Scale which havefive answers for students to choose, namely, strongly agreed, agreed,uncertain, disagreed, strongly disagreed. Students are required to chooseone of them for each question. For the positive questions, if studentschoose “strongly disagreed”, they can get 1 point, if students choose“disagreed”, they can get 2 points, if students choose “uncertain”, theycan get 3 points, if students choose “agreed”, they can get 4 points and ifstudents choose “strongly agreed”, they can get 5 points. As for thenegative questions, the points which they get are reversed. Like items 4, 8,10 in the pre-questionnaire and items 1, 3, 10 in the post-questionnaire.At the beginning of the experiment, all the 113 students were askedto fill the pre-questionnaire, and they were not required to write downtheir name or number, so they could choose the answers without anyworries. All the questionnaires have been collected and none of them areinvalid. So all the statistics is recorded into SPSS.
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Conclusion
This empirical and experimental study is on the basis of the Zone ofProximal Development and Constructivism and aims to explore theeffects of scaffolding instruction on students’ vocabulary learninginterests, confidence and ability in junior high schools. In this part, theauthor summarizes the main findings and mentions some theoretical andpedagogical implications. What’s more, the limitations of this study andsome possible suggestions for further studies are also illustrated anddiscussed.In order to cope with the research questions of this study, the authorreviewed the related studies of scaffolding instruction and vocabularyteaching, as well as the theoretical basis, namely, the Zone of ProximalDevelopment and Constructivism. And it is widely acknowledged that theexperiment is the core part of an experimental and empirical study. Sothis experiment is carried out carefully for three steps. Firstly, in order toget the general idea of students’vocabulary proficiency and their interestsand confidence toward vocabulary learning, a pretest and apre-questionnaire were held before the different treatment. Secondly, twodifferent instructions of vocabulary were implemented on students. Theexperimental group were taught under scaffolding instruction invocabulary teaching, while the control group under traditional vocabulary teaching method. Lastly, after the different treatment, a post-test wascarried out in these two groups and a post-questionnaire was implementedin experimental group. In this way, the positive effects of scaffoldinginstruction in vocabulary teaching can be proved.#p#分页标题#e#
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References (abbreviated)
