An Empirical Research On Emotional Scaffolding In Senior High School English Writing Instruction

Students’ emotional responses to academic subject matter are very significant to learning behavior and achievement in teaching, and positive responses are beneficial to learning. So, teachers and educators should give prominence to students’ emotions and guide students to engage in learning with positive emotions. At home, there have been a lot of researches on students’ learning emotions, however, many researchers focus on theories but few on exploring how to response to students’ learning emotions in teaching.Based on past researches, the thesis takes senior high school English writing instruction as its breakthrough point and adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to ascertain the types of Emotional Scaffolding exiting in senior high school English writing instruction and inspect the influence of Emotional Scaffolding on students’ writing performance. The thesis consists of three parts systematically, including the exploration of the type and the practical application of Emotional Scaffolding in senior high school English writing instruction.The first research is the foundation of the thesis which uses the way of qualitative method. The author chooses22senior high school English teachers as participants, having interviews with them and cording the interview materials. The participants are required to talk about their teaching experience and feelings when they respond to students’ writing emotions in English writing instruction. Then, the author translates the recording into text and codes all the texts. Through coding, the author finds the main types of Emotional Scaffolding in senior high school English writing instruction.The second research is done with a questionnaire, which is made by practical investigation and interview. The questionnaire is designed to investigate the use frequency of Emotional Scaffolding and given out to80senior high school English teachers in Shenzhen, Xi’an and Shijiazhuang. The goal of the research is to make clear of the Emotional Scaffolding in senior high school English writing instruction through quantitative study.The third research explores the influence of Emotional Scaffolding on students’ writing achievements through teaching field experiments. There are201sophomore and senior three students from Shenzhen as participants who take part in the experiments. The main conclusions of the three researches are as follows:1. There are seven common Emotional Scaffoldings, which are "activity experience","analogy","visual representations","positive reinforcement","reducing writing requirements appropriately","classroom communication", and "writing students’ interests"."Activity experience","analogy" and "positive reinforcement" are the typical representatives.2. Under the guidance of "activity experience", the achievements of sophomores are better than senior three students, while it is contrary to "analogy" and the same to "no Emotional Scaffolding".3. As for sophomores, the writing achievements with "activity experience" are better than the writing achievements with "analogy" and "no Emotional Scaffolding", and there is no significant difference between "analogy" and "no Emotional Scaffolding".4. As for senior three students, there is no significant difference between "analogy" and "no Emotional Scaffolding" in students’ writing achievements; there is also no significant difference between "activity experience" and "no Emotional Scaffolding" in students’ writing achievements; while the writing achievements with "analogy" are better than the achievements under the guidance of "activity experience".