An Empirical Study On The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To The English Continuation Task Teaching In Senior High School

English writing plays an important role in promoting students’ second language acquisition,it’s also one of the most challenging tasks in English learning.In recent years,continuation task has incorporated by new National Matriculation English Test.This writing task fully integrates reading and writing,which puts high demands on English teachers and students in senior high school.Therefore,how to enhance the effectiveness of continuation task teaching and improve students’ writing attitude and writing achievement is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed at present.Scaffolding instruction,as a mature teaching model,has been applied to classroom teaching.This study attempts to explore its effectiveness on the teaching of English continuation task in senior high school and answer the following two questions:1.What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on students’ attitude towards continuation task writing?2.What is the effect of scaffolding instruction on students’ writing achievement of continuation task?This study selected two parallel classes of 88 senior one students in a high school in Ganzhou City,Jiangxi Province as research subjects,and conducted a 14-week experiment.In the teaching of continuation task,the experimental class(EC)adopted the scaffolding instruction,while the control class(CC)adopted the traditional writing teaching mode.Before the experiment,the two classes were tested for their writing scores and were surveyed by questionnaire on their attitudes towards continuation task.After the experiment,the same questionnaire and another writing test were conducted on the students in EC and CC.In addition,six students from EC were selected for interviews and their pre-test and post-test continuation task writing works were collected to analyze their changes after the experiment.Then the data were analyzed by software such as SPSS 23,and the results of the study are as follows.1.Scaffolding instruction exert a positive influence on improving students’ attitude towards continuation task writing.After the experiment,students in EC have a more comprehensive cognition of this writing task,and their learning interest and confidence are also improved much.In addition,they are inclined to use more writing strategies.2.Scaffolding instruction can improve students’ writing achievement in continuation task.Compared with CC,students in EC gain higher average scores in post-test.In addition,the post-test writing works of the students in EC also showed that they made some progress in terms of accuracy and variety of vocabulary and grammar,as well as in terms of the richness of the created plots and its consistency with the original text.Based on the results above,this study put forward some suggestions.First and foremost,teachers need to analyze students’ problems and difficulty in continuation task writing.Furthermore,teachers should design diverse and dynamic scaffolding to enhance students’ writing skills.Last but not least,teachers could encourage students to cooperate with their classmates and evaluate their writing works efficiently.