Scaffolding Learners’ Comprehension in Extensive Reading

The present study serves as an insightful teaching summary that focuses on students’ reading comprehension, through investigating the effectiveness and application of a teacher’s scaffolding in a one-semester extensive reading course. The teacher provides scaffolding throughout an entire semester of the extensive reading course. Students’ performance on multiple-choice questions of the first as well as the last unit has been collected and analyzed to determine whether they have enhanced their reading comprehension abilities or not. Based on the both qualitative and quantitative data, the findings reveal that students’ comprehension competence of extensive reading materials has notably increased after a semester of the teacher’s scaffolding. The result suggests that reading skills such as guessing, outlining, identifying topic sentence of each paragraph and determining the main idea of a passage can be applied as effective scaffolding techniques in extensive reading courses.