Strategies to Transform Introverted Students into Better Public Speakers: A Case Study

Abstract

In the communicative process, the introvert personalities display negative influences on foreign language acquisition. However, teachers' scaffold can increase introverted students' willingness to venture into new ZPD and go through a transformation. Despite the obvious necessity of supporting and assisting shy individuals to expand the scope of their social experiences and realize their personal potential, there is a knowledge gap in the field of "supportive strategies for lowering the threshold of new ZPD for introverted students". To fill in this gap, we conducted a project-based case study in the setting of a high school in China, and employed the method of action research to document its operating procedures and specific supportive strategies. The results proved our two hypotheses that teachers' scaffold can lower the threshold of ZPD and that the flow experience can serve as a trans-formative power of intrinsic motivation. This study is a pilot experiment and will be generalized to more follow-up experiments.