The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Writing In The Senior High School

Writing is the important reflect of students’ comprehensive skills in the study ofEnglish. It can reflect a level of students’ English basic skill, but in senior high schoolEnglish teaching, the teachers pay more attention only on the output of the results andignore the process, which leads more and more students can not realize the importance ofwriting. The classroom teaching mode is usually the teacher-center, while this form ofteaching does not benefit the improvement of students’ English, at the same time it alsohinders the improvement of teaching quality. Based on the present situation, this thesisattempts to combine the scaffolding with the writing teaching to create a different teachingsituation for the students.Scaffolding was first introduced by Wood, Bruner and Ross in1976, the theoreticalfoundation of scaffolding instruction including constructivism theory, the Zone of ProximalDevelopment theory and Vygotsky’s social-culture theory. It builds appropriate support forstudents and helps students explore independently in the specific context, and makesstudents complete the construction of meaning. Though this teaching method application inforeign countries is very common, but in our country it is still in its infancy, so in order tochange the current situation of students’ writing, the author applies the theory to Englishwriting teaching in senior high school to make a further empirical research.Based on the application of scaffolding instruction theory in English writing, thisthesis will study two questions:1. Can the scaffolding instruction improve students’ writing interest?2. Can the scaffolding instruction improve students’ English writing proficiency?This thesis consists of five chapters. The author first analyzes the present situation ofsenior high school English writing as well as the significance and the purpose of the study.Next is literature review which introduces the studies on scaffolding abroad and at home,the theoretical foundations and the development processes of the constructivism, the theoryof the zone of proximal development and social-culture theory, the domestic research onEnglish writing in our country and writing teaching mode under the guidance ofscaffolding theory. After all the researches above is experiment part which discusses howto apply the theory to English writing teaching, and use the method of test, questionnaire,and interview to conduct a series of teaching experiments. After experiments, the author moves to the collection and analysis of experimental data. The data collected from thepre-test and the post-test, then statistic and analyze it through the SPSS11.5software.Finally the experiment results are reviewed and summarized. The last part is conclusionswhich expound the main findings, the enlightenments and the deficiencies of this study.Experiment shows that the scaffolding teaching can improve students’ writinginterests, and the result of the data in EC shows that the mean score of pre-test andpost-test are respectively14.19and16.20, the value of Sig.(2-tailed) is0.000which issmaller than0.05. It indicates that there is a significant difference between pre-test andpost-test. So this teaching method can also develop students’ writing proficiency, and it iseffectiveness in the senior high school English writing teaching.