Gender Effects On Scaffolding Function Types On Peer Revision In English Writing

Peer revision activity has been introduced into the English writing course for a long time.Through communicating with their partners,students can find out some errors in their compositions,and with the help of partners,they will finally revise these errors and successfully play the active role in the learning process.According to previous researches,in the communication process of writing revision,peer scaffoldings are found to be beneficial in students' language learning.In order to get more empirical findings,Chinese researchers have conducted experiments from different perspectives,such as peers of different language levels,different peer scaffolding functions,and so forth.Although such kinds of researches enjoy popularity for a long time,few scholars have mentioned the question that whether peers' gender difference may influence their scaffolding functions in the revision activity.Therefore,in this study,researcher has divided the participants into three kinds of pairs----boy-boy pair,girl-girl pair,and boy-girl mixed pair,in order to observe their varied scaffolding functions and also explore the main features and reasons about peers' gender differences.In this study,eight college freshmen were selected as the subjects(freshmen who are attending the College English course),including four girls and four boys.Their English scores were average in their college.Researcher arranged them to work in pairs,which included same gender pairs and mixed gender pairs.In each group,one of the partners was asked to write a composition,and then the communication process of revision activity started as soon as possible,which might last about20-30 minutes.Researcher recorded the whole communication process by Mp3 and then transcribed recordings to the written mode.After students handed in the final revised composition,they should attend the interview to answer related questions.The whole observation and experiment process lasted one month.The major findings of the present study indicated that: obvious differences ofscaffolding functions could be found in three different kinds of gender pairs.The differences can be analyzed from two aspects: scaffolding function types and appearance frequency of each type.Compared with the same-gender pairs,five types of scaffolding function are found in the mixed-gender pairs,and the appearance frequency of each type is very close in the mixed-gender pairs.In three groups,frequency changes of three function types: Recruitment,FC and Demonstration are obvious,which are connected tightly with gender factor.According to the interview results,gender perceptions and conversational styles can be used to explain the major differences of each pair.To be specific,scaffolding functions are built on the oral language in the process;at the same time,students often hold strong gender perceptions in their mind,therefore their conversational styles have been influenced when they are faced with different gender partners;and finally,the data changes of different scaffolding functions can be directly observed in each group.Altogether,that's the whole process of how gender factor brings influence to the scaffolding functions.Lastly,according to the accuracy data,girl-boy pairs become the best groups which can get the most obvious fruits in the revision activity.This study has proved that,gender factor can influence the peer revision activity,especially in the communication process.To some extent,the learning efficiency will also be influenced.Single-gender education can not be found in college English course,which means educators should not ignore the gender factor in the class.If teachers can arrange students to work in the proper gender pairs,they will provide students with more opportunities to learn from each other.