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An Empirical Study On Application Of Scaffolding Teaching In English Writing In Junior High School

Posted on:2014-08-27Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:F XieFull Text:PDF
GTID:2267330425955356Subject:Education
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
With the increasing development of society and the increasing frequency ofinternational exchanges, English has become a common language, especially whenboth sides of communication fail to grasp each other’s mother tongue, English plays arole of interlanguage which could make communication easier. The reform of Englishteaching has been conducted for a long time. However, due to various reasons;classroom teaching is still not in accordance in big strides with the general directionof reform. on the teaching of writing, the Product Approach, a traditional teachingmethod which mainly rely on imitation gets more attention, the results of writing andthe correctness of the grammatical structure are being emphasized on, but this kind ofwriting method ignores the possible difficulties students would meet during thewriting process and ignores the solutions that should be given when the junior highschool students imitating the sample writings.Scaffolding teaching which was based on the social constructivism anddeveloped under the shadow of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”. It is ateaching mode of providing timely and appropriate assistance when the learners areblocked by difficulties during the learning. The learners decompose the complexlearning tasks with the help of adults or other more capable peers as well as relying onthe concept frameworks and then accomplish these tasks. The abilities to accomplishtasks independently improve during the process. As soon as the learners acquired thecapacities, the help, also called scaffolding, provided by teachers and other morecapable peers would be removed and then the learners would prepare for the nextzone of proximal development.This teaching mode was applied abroad first and proved to be effective while thestudy was comparatively limited in China. So this study attempt to apply scaffoldingtheory to the English writing teaching in junior high school, through comparing thetraditional method, the Product Approach, with the scaffolding teaching for Englishwriting in a designed teaching experiment for a period of16teaching weeks.Experiment was carried out in two parallel eighth-grade classes of Xiantang Middle School in Dongyuan County, Guangdong Province. These two classes were randomlyassigned to the final selection, one of the classes for the Experimental Group takingscaffolding teaching to the writing teaching, another class for the Control Group usingthe traditional Product Approach as the guidance of writing teaching. The scaffoldingteaching was conducted by the same teacher, with the same teaching material and thesame rate of progress. Surveys and writing tests were used in the experiment asmeasurement tools. Questionnaires were carried out twice as pre-questionnaire andpost-questionnaire and English writing test was divided into two parts, the pre-testand post-test.The data collected was analyzed with SPSS20(Statistics Package for SocialScience Version20). The results of pre-test showed no significant difference in thetwo classes of English writing proficiency; the results after experiment illustrated thatthe traditional Product Approach didn’t show obvious effect on promoting thestudents’ writing, however, after a teaching experiment for sixteen weeks, theExperimental Group got a significant development on the writing proficiency underthe instructional teaching. By analyzing the data, we might see that the vocabulary,grammar and structure improved a lot; the results of pre-questionnaire also showedthat there was a negative tendency towards traditional writing teaching while a highacceptance towards scaffolding teaching appeared after the teaching experimentwhich could be seen in the post-questionnaire.The author hopes that the conclusions of this study have some implications forEnglish writing teaching in junior high school. However, in view of the author’slimited knowledge of the author and the unpredictable impacts of other aspects of thedesign, the conclusions of the study need a further discussion and verification. Thescaffolding teaching theory applied also needs more practical verification andimprovement in the teaching of English writing in junior high school.
Keywords/Search Tags:constructivism, zone of proximal development, scaffolding, scaffoldingteaching, English writing
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