An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Scaffolding Instruction On English Writing

English writing,as productive skill,can reflect student’s comprehensive English competence,and also takes an important role in College Entrance Examination.It has been taken as one of the most important courses in senior high school.However,in rural areas,students’ English writing proficiency is not so desirable and English writing has not received sufficient attention due to the limited teaching resources and traditional educational ideas of teachers.Scaffolding instruction,as one of the teaching methods generated from constructivism,has proved its efficacy in many fields.In terms of English writing,some studies have revealed the effectiveness of scaffolding instruction on improving students’ English writing proficiency,but in most cases,college and senior high school students in cities were the subjects,while the students in rural areas were seldom investigated.Therefore,the present study,taking students in a rural senior high school as subjects,attempts to explore the overall effect of scaffolding instruction on English writing and its specific effects on different aspects of writing.Altogether 78 Grade one students of two classes were selected as the subjects based on their comprehensive English proficiency and writing proficiency.Half of them were randomly arranged as the control group and the rest as the experimental group.In the 16-week experiment,students in the experimental group received 14-week scaffolding instruction of English writing,while the students in the control group received 14-week conventional teaching method of English writing.In the last week of the study,students of two classes participated in the posttest.The writings in the pretest and posttest were evaluated in terms of content,organization,vocabulary,language use and writing mechanics according to Jacobs’ ESL Composition Profile Criteria.The integral scores and component scores were analyzed through descriptive analysis and T-tests of SPSS19.0.Major findings of this study are:(1)Scaffolding instruction has positive and significant effect on rural senior high school students’ overall English writing proficiency.(2)The effects of scaffolding instruction on content,organization,vocabulary,language use and mechanics in writing are all found to be remarkable.(3)The conventional teaching method has shown its efficacy on language use of English writing,but the effect on other aspects of writing is not obvious.These findings suggest that scaffolding instruction contributes significantly to the improvement of English writing,and it could be employed as an effective teaching method of English writing in rural senior high school for better achievements.In this sense,the present study may enrich the empirical studies on the effect of scaffolding instruction on English writing of rural senior high school students,and may also provide some suggestions for further research.