A Study On The Scaffolding Teaching To English Writing In Junior High Schools

English writing is important in English learning for the students in junior high school. Not only is it one of the four basic skills of language learning but also it is an important aspect of communicative ability. As we all known, English plays a role of interlanguage which can make communication easier. The reform of English teaching has been conducted for a long time. However, due to various reasons; classroom teaching is still not catch up with the pace of the general direction of reform. The Product Approach, a traditional teaching method which pays more attention to imitation, the results of writing and the correctness of the grammatical structure are being emphasized on, but this kind of writing method neglects the possible difficulties students would meet during the writing process and ignores the solutions that should be given when the junior high school students imitating the sample writings.Scaffolding teaching is based upon constructivism, which depends upon “the Zone of Proximal Development” created by Vygotsky. It is a teaching model of providing timely and appropriate assistance when the learners are blocked by difficulties. During the learning process, the learners decompose the complex learning tasks step by step with the help of teachers or other more capable peers as well as relying on the concept frameworks and then accomplish these tasks. The abilities to accomplish tasks independently improve during the process. As soon as the learners acquired the capacities, the assistance, also called scaffolding, would be removed and then the learners would prepare for the next zone of proximal development.This study is to carry out an empirical study to demonstrate the effect of scaffolding theory on English teaching of writing in junior high schools. The author aims at proposing the scaffold-based teaching method on English writing in EFL class. So the principal objective of this study is to test the applicability of scaffolding theory in students’ writing process and achieve significant achievements.There are three research questions in the study: 1) Can scaffolding teaching improve overall English writing achievements of junior high school students? 2) Can scaffolding teaching lead to the improvement in writing accuracy, complexity and fluency of junior high school students? 3) Can scaffolding teaching improve junior student’s attitude towards writing in the experimental class? Therefore, this study attempts to apply scaffolding theory to the English writing teaching in junior high schools, through comparing the traditional method, the Product Approach, with the scaffolding teaching for English writing in a designed teaching experiment for a period of 8 teaching weeks. Experiment was carried out in two parallel eighth-grade classes of number two Middle School in Kang Le County, Gansu Province. These two classes were randomly assigned to the final selection; class one served as the experimental class which is taking scaffolding method to the writing teaching, while class two served as the control class which is using the traditional Product Approach as the guidance of writing teaching. The scaffolding teaching was conducted by the same teacher, with the same teaching material and the same rate of progress. Writing tests, interview and composition analyses were used in the experiment as measurement tools, and English writing test was divided into two parts, the pre-test and post-test.The data collected was analyzed with SPSS 19.0(Statistics Package for Social Science Version 19.0). The results of pre-test in two classes showed that there is no significant difference in writing proficiency; the results after experiment illustrated that compared with the scaffolding teaching method, the traditional product approach didn’t show obvious effect on promoting the students’ writing scores; however, after a teaching experiment for eight weeks, the experimental group got a significant development on the writing proficiency under the instructional teaching. By analyzing the students’ writing data, we might see that the scaffolding teaching can greatly improve in writing accuracy, complexity and fluency of junior high school students, and the interview results also showed that the students have positive attitude towards scaffolding teaching, and it can strongly promote their writing motivation and learning interests.The author hopes that the conclusions of this study have some implications for English writing teaching in junior high school. However, in view of the author’s limited knowledge of the author and the unpredictable impacts of other aspects of the design, the conclusions of the study need a further discussion and verification. The scaffolding teaching theory applied also needs more practical verification and improvement in the teaching of English writing in junior high school.