Zones Of Proximal Development Theory And Its Application To Peer Composition Tutoring

Middle school teachers usually try very hard to help students improve their writing skills in English right from the start of Grade 1. But they are always faced with a difficult situation. For example, a teacher who has to teach more than 90 students at a time may find it extremely hard to conscientiously revise each of the compositions. On the part of the students, however, they tend to put the revised composition aside without even looking at it again when the essay is returned. Consequently, students' achievement in writing usually lags behind their other English skills. As it is almost impossible for the teacher to give each student individual guidance, the writing abilities of most students remain at the same level as they entered into the school. As a result, they tend to lose interests in making further efforts to improve their writing abilities.Nowadays some teachers have begun to use the peer revision method to enhance the achievement of their students in writing. Although this approach can positively help students achieve more in writing, there are still a number of problems confronting teachers, such as how to divide the students into different groups and how to organize the students efficiently in the process, and so on. Obviously these problems need to be resolved and further studies need to be conducted.Based on theories of zones of proximal development and scaffolding instruction, the writer of this thesis attempts to conduct a study on peer composition tutoring. First, depending on their composition scores, two classes of Junior Grade 2 students were selected as the subjects. As the English composition scores of these students were very approximate, one of the two classes was randomly assigned as the experimental class and the other as the control class. Next, the students of the experimental class were divided into 4 groups according to their writing abilities. They were Group A, Group B, Group C and Group D. The students in the higher-level group revised the compositions of the students in lower-level groups and then gave suggestions and instructions. The compositions from Group A were tutored by the teacher. Group D students didn't take the responsibility for revising others' compositions but they had to revise their own compositions following their peer's suggestions. At the same time, lessons given in the control class were still conducted by using the traditional methods.The author intends to address the following questions in this study:1. Can peer tutoring positively help change the attitudes of the students towards English writing?2. What are the major concerns of the students in revising their compositions?3. Can peer tutoring help improve students achievement in writing?4. Which group os students in the experimental class will make the greatest progress in this study?This study was designed as a quasi-experiment which lasted for three months. The pre-test and post-test were conducted at the beginning and end of the experiment respectively so that significant differences between the experimental class and the control class could be observed. Two final exams, frequent composition assignments and three questionnaires were also conducted as instruments. The result of this study proves: 1. Students in the experimental class became more interested in the writing practice when the peer tutoring approach was adopted; 2. In revising their peer's compositions, students paid more attention to tenses, spellings, punctuations and logical connections between sentences and paragraphs; 3. Peer tutoring had some positive effects on the writing achievement of the students; 4. Students at the advanced and intermediate levels made more progress in their writing practice.Admittedly, there are some limitations in this quasi-experiment such as the brief time span and the small range of subjects. Therefore further studies on peer tutoring need to be carried out on a larger scale in the future.