The Effectiveness of Scaffolding Strategy in EFL reading comprehension

The aim of this article is to examine the effectiveness of scaffolding in improving reading comprehension skills in an EFL reading context. An experimental design was applied in this article. Participants of this study were 60 students of English Education at Jambi University. The students in the experimental and the control group read the same English texts. In the experimental group, students were helped by scaffolding questions in cooperative learning condition. In the control group, students had no scaffolding questions in conventional learning condition. A pre-test and post-test were administered to measure students' comprehension before and after reading classes in both groups. Statistical analyses using an independent sample t-test were conducted to compare mean scores of scaffolding reading class as the experimental group and non-scaffolding class as the control group. The results revealed that scaffolding provides a differential effect on reading comprehension gain for the lower and higher ability students in the experimental group. This suggests that the lower students of scaffolding group benefited more in terms of reading comprehension gain than the higher ability students.