A Study On The Effect Of Scaffolding Teaching On Syntactic Complexities Of Senior High School Students’ English Writing

Writing is one of the most important language output forms for English learners,and it is also one of the most difficult points in English teaching.The quality of English writing demonstrates the ability of learners to use language to communicate with others.Syntactic features occupy a very important position among all the linguistic features to measure the quality of composition.Since the 1970 s,more and more foreign scholars have attached importance to the characteristics of sentence patterns in second language writing,and syntactic complexity has also been regarded as an important indicator for the development of second language writing.More and more researchers have found that syntactic complexity of English writing texts can reflect the author’s composition quality.While scaffolding teaching method is aimed at improving students’ self-learning ability and problem-solving abilities.It has achieved great success in recent teaching practice.In order to explore the influence of scaffolding teaching method on the syntactic complexity of senior high school English writing,this study takes a high school in Z city as an experimental school and designs a five-step scaffolding writing teaching process for a 10-week teaching experiment.Four measures were used: mean length of sentences(MLS),clauses per sentence(C/S),mean length of clauses(MLC)and complex clauses per sentence(CC/S).The purpose of this paper is to find out the influence of scaffolding teaching method on syntactic complexity in English writing of senior high school students.In this study,the specific research problems are as follows:(1)What is the effect of scaffolding teaching method on syntactic complexity in English writing of senior high school students?(2)What is the effect of scaffolding teaching method on syntactic complexity of English learners at different levels?(3)What is the effect of scaffolding teaching method on students’ English writing?Through the study of the above three issues,conclusions are drawn as below: First,compared with the traditional teaching model of English writing,scaffolding teaching has some advantages in improving the syntactic complexity of students’ English writing,which can effectively improve the ratio of clauses(C/S)and the ratio of complex clauses(CC/S)in students’ writing.To mean length of sentence(MLS)and clause length(MLC),the methodology also indicates some advantages.Second,scaffolding teaching has different effects on syntacticcomplexity of students at different levels:(1)for high-level students,the scaffolding teaching method has more advantages than the traditional teaching mode in improving mean length of sentence and clause of the students;(2)for middle-level students,scaffolding teaching plays a significant role in promoting mean length of sentences and clause,and clause ratio;(3)for low-level students,scaffolding teaching method is superior to traditional writing teaching model in improving the mean length of sentences.Last but not least,the thinking mode of scaffolding teaching method can help to overcome students’ writing demons,cultivate their writing self-confidence,stimulate their interest in learning and then improve their English writing ability.Based on the research of four concrete elements about syntactic complexity of high school students’ English writing texts,this study reveals the influence of scaffolding teaching on the syntactic complexity of students’ English writing,and points out the effect of the scaffolding teaching method on English writing and teaching.This study reveals the impact of scaffolding teaching method on improving the syntactic complexity of high school students’ English writing,and has a positive guiding significance for English writing teaching and learning.