The Application of Scaffolding Theory in Oral Business English Teaching at Higher Vocational College

Li+Si-yuan

【Abstract】Based on constructivism and ZPD， the present study went through experimental teaching in two parallel classes for a semester in Hunan International Business College： One class was chosen as the experimental class for the scaffolding introduction implementation， and the other as the control class following PPP approach. A study will be carried out comparing the conventional presentation， practice and production （PPP） OBET approach with the scaffolding instruction.

【Key words】oral business English ； scaffolding instruction ； communicative competence ； higher vocational college

【中圖分类号】G64 【文献标识码】B 【文章编号】2095-3089（2015）2-0029-01

1. Research Hypotheses

The study aims to confirm the hypotheses that the scaffoldingbased teaching approach is better than the PPP teaching method to improve students oral business English.

2. Subjects

The experiment involved 60 students from two intact classes in Hunan International Business Vocational College. Both the experimental class and the control class have 30 students respectively， and all of them are freshman and native speakers of Chinese who majored in Business English. They have been divided into two classes after they entered this college， following with the normal administrative procedures at the college， in a manner that might be expected to result in very similar ability. The two classes have no obvious difference in terms of English proficiency and application ability. In addition， the researcher simultaneously taught these two classes which could make sure that the experiment results would not be influenced by the other factors such as the students and teachers former abilities and so on. Class 1 who received the scaffolding instruction was assigned as the experimental group and the class 2 was arranged in a control group who were taught with the PPP teaching approach.

3. Research Instruments

The research instruments connected with this study are involved in as following： pretest and posttest， videorecording， students logs and Statistical Program for Social Sciences （SPSS （19.0）） software.

At first， two oral business English tests are going. Business English Certificates （BEC） Preliminary & Secondary Oral English Level Exam is one of the most popular tests testing business English level which have high validity. And the researcher adopted the form of exam to test studentsrequency， complexity and accuracy in oral business English. Of course， the examination score is a significant measure index to the students. All the participants from class 1 and class 2 have to actively take part in the pretest and posttest activities.endprint

The pretest aims at diagnosing BEC Preliminary Oral English Level of all participants. The posttest was designed to measure the BEC Secondary Oral English Level of all participants. All the participants needed to accomplish the second testing paper on time within given14 minutes.

Besides， in order to prove the availability of the scaffolding instruction in oral business English teaching better， the author had to make a deep study through class observation using videotape and students logs to record， and then collected the data from the experiment for analyses.

Thirdly， to analyze the data that are originated from the experiment SPSS （19.0） software is adopted when analyzing the data collected from pretests and posttests in quantitative way.

4. Research Procedures

The research lasted one semester， from March， 2012 to June 2012， and both qualitative and quantitative researches were involved in .The study was implemented among 60 participants as research subjects. The procedures of this experiment could be divided into the following steps： classroom experiment including pretest of BEC Preliminary Oral English Level and posttest of BEC Secondary Oral English Level； classroom investigation including videorecording， students log and questionnaires； data collection and analysis.

After finishing collecting all the raw data， the researcher dealt with the results of videotape recording and questionnaires investigation in qualitative way. Quantitative data related to the results of the scores of the pretest and posttest of the two classes could be made a comparison between the control class and the experimental class to determine differences the and the improvement on OBET among the participants.

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