An Action Research On Scaffolding Instruction In English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

Higher requirements are put forward to the students’ English in junior high school according to the new curriculum reform.And writing ability is one of the important components of students’ English language ability,which fully reflects the learners’ ability to output in English.However,influenced by traditional teaching,students’ ability to use English has not been paid attention to.At present,students’ interest and awareness of English writing are weak,and the improvement of students’ writing ability is hindered.The purposes of this study are to analyze the current situation and shortcomings of students’ English writing in Grade Nine,and to analyze the impact of Scaffolding Teaching Model on students’ interest,attitude and writing ability.The main research questions are as follows:（1）What is the current situation of English writing ability of the students in Grade Nine?（2）What are the influences of scaffolding teaching mode on the interest and attitude of the students of Grade Nine in English writing?（3）To what extent has scaffolding teaching improved students’ English writing ability in Grade Nine?In view of the above problems,the author takes 62 students as the research objects.Under the guidance of constructive theory and zone of proximal development theory,the author makes an action research on the application of Scaffolding Teaching in English Writing Teaching in junior high school.The literature method and comparative analysis method are mainly taken as the research methods,while test papers,questionnaire,interview and teaching log are regarded as the data collection tools to ensure the effectiveness and reliability of the study.The specific research is mainly carried out from the following three steps.Firstly,on the basis of a detailed understanding of the students,the author understands the current situation of the English writing ability of the students in Grade Nine by using some research tools and observing.Then,based on the scaffolding teaching mode,the students’ compositions and the impacts of Scaffolding Teaching Mode on students’ interest and attitude are analyzed.Finally,the students’ compositions are evaluated.The following conclusions can be drawn:（1）Before the implementation of the scaffolding teaching,the current situation of students’ writing ability have firstly been understood.There is no doubt that most students make a lot of grammatical mistakes when writing a passage.They would use Chinglish when writing a passage.Some of them have a small number of vocabularies,unclear syntactic structure.They are unable to flexibly apply fixed collocations and they have a bad understanding of the verbs’ functions.There are multiple verbs in a simple sentence in their works,a small number of students have lowercase initial letters,and there are many commas in one sentence,which brings students into the dilemma of writing.（2）By comparing the data among the pre-test,the second test and the third test and analyzing the teaching log,the result of the semi-structured interview and so on,the following conclusions are drawn:after the scaffolding teaching of English writing teaching,students become more interested in writing and take writing more seriously.（3）Students achieve great success in vocabularies,lexical,syntactical and discourse level.After the evacuation of scaffold,students can put the words related to their major topic into a complete sentence.Their sense of English language gets improved.They are able to avoid using Chinglish and put all the sentences into a passage,which proves that students’ English writing ability can be improved based on the scaffolding writing teaching.An action research on 62 students in Grade 9 of a junior high school in Anshun is mainly carried out for nearly four months.Before the action research,the author analyzes the early test papers and teaching logs to understand the current situation and existing problems of students in English writing.In the first round of action research,the author designs an action plan according to the research problems and explores the application of Scaffolding Teaching in English writing teaching.After the first round of action research,the evaluation and reflection are made.The author adjusted the action plan again,carried out the second round of action research,analyzed the data of the two rounds of action research,summarized and reflected again.The students’ existing knowledge and experience are understood before the writing class in order to find the nearest development area.Before using the scaffolding teaching,the questionnaire should be given to understand their foundation.In the teaching process,the teacher will follow the sequence of "situation creation-introducing the theme-building the scaffolding-guiding the exploration-peer assistance-withdrawing the scaffolding-independent exploration-multiple evaluation and feedback" to build different scaffolding for students to write.The author hopes that under the guidance of the recent development zone theory and constructive theory,more and more English teachers can reasonably apply the scaffolding teaching model to teaching and provide new ideas for English Writing Teaching in junior high school.