A Study On Application Of Scaffolding Instruction In Junior English Writing Teaching

With the increasing internationalization of our economy, education and culture, writing is a more frequently-used skill and of higher value than before. And English writing itself is not just a test of language competence, it also relates to students further study and employment issues. Therefore, as one of the main aims in New Curriculum Standard, English writing now is demanded to be more instrumental and humanistic. From the perspective of elementary education, English writing is comparably important and difficult part in Senior School Entrance English Examination. Though the students overall English level is improving, writing seems to be blocked, by using of traditional teaching approaches, and writing is still the weakness of students. Thus, there is more to be done on writing teaching model research.Scaffolding instruction is a new teaching model that based on Social Constructionism, set under the influence of Vygotsky s !Zone of Proximal Development". This teaching model has already been proved to be effective by some foreign empirical researches while the study on junior writing teaching is still very limited in China. This thesis applies the scaffolding theory to junior high school English writing teaching by controlling the variables and designing teaching procedure to compare the different teaching efficiency between Product approach and scaffolding instruction. The research is aimed at answering two questions as below:1. Whether the scaffolding instruction could do better in improving the students English writing on score than Product approach?2. Whether the scaffolding instruction could do better in stimulating students learning interest and improving their writing motivation than Product approach?To further elucidate the applicability of scaffolding theory to English writing teaching, an empirical experiment of fourteen weeks with two classes in Ganzhou Middle School has been performed and recorded. One of these two classes was randomly chosen as the Control Group, the students in this class learned English writing by Product approach. Another class, set as the Experimental Group, took the classes under scaffolding instruction in three main steps: skills and knowledge input, scaffolding construction and assessment. Before experiment, both groups attended pre-test and pre-questionnaire. During the experiment, both groups used the same teaching material and their English teachers was the same. After experiment, questionnaires and writing tests were used to educe the research result. The data were collected and analyzed by the software SPSS17.0 to compare the teaching effects of Product approach and scaffolding instruction.The major findings from the experiment are as follow:1) Compared with Product approach, with the guidance of scaffolding instruction, the students better performed on writing score.2) Compared with Product approach, with the guidance of scaffolding instruction, the students received an improvement in their self-learning abilities and became more active in class participation, moreover, their writing interest and motivation strengthened greatly.The study demonstrates the applicability and the effectiveness of scaffolding instruction for junior English writing teaching, it is expected to provide future researches of new English writing teaching model with some reference.