An Experimental Study Of Scaffolding-Theory-Based English Writing Teaching In Junior Middle School

English is the most widely used language in the world. With the development of science and technology and economic globalization,people's requirements for English learning also shows a rising trend. English writing, as an important output skill, reflects the comprehensive language capabilities of learners, therefore, it plays an important role in English teaching and learning. It is emphasized that writing skill is the integrated use of language and one of the four basic skills in the Curriculum Criteria of Compulsory Education for English(2011). Detailed requirements and objectives are put forward in accordance with different grades in the curriculum. Writing occupies 15 points out of 150 points in the yearly senior high school entrance examination, so writing is very important. In teaching practice, although teachers are aware of the importance of writing teaching, the current writing teaching effect is not optimistic. The main source of the problem is that many teachers still adopt the traditional methods(the Product Approach) in junior middle school. They make students spend a large amount of time remembering vocabularies and reciting passages, but they produce very little effect. The students are frightened of writing and lose interest.Constructivism Theory and Zone of Proximal Development are the theoretical basis of the study, which explores the effectiveness of scaffolding writing teaching model in the junior middle school through experimental study. The experiment takes two parallel classes(Grade 8) of Zhenlong Middle School in Luogang District, Guangzhou as the research objects, one of the classes is the Control Group, the other is the Experimental Group. The experimental time is 16 weeks. The specific research questions of the study include:(1) Can scaffolding English writing teaching model improve junior middle school students' writing proficiency?(2) What impacts does scaffolding English writing teaching model make on the use of sentence patterns / structures in their writing? Teaching materials, periods and the teacher are the same except the teaching method. The traditional teaching method(the Product Approach) is adopted in the Control Group, while the scaffolding writing teaching model is adopted in the Experimental Group. The experiment includes pre-test, experimental preparation, teaching operation of two classes, after the test. Both of the data of pre-test and post-test are typed into the computer and analyzed by SSPS17.0. Through independent sample analysis and paired sample analysis, it is found that the English writing proficiency of the two groups was basically the same, but there were significant differences between the two groups in the post test, the average score of the Experimental Group was much higher than that of the Control Group. Meanwhile the manual statistics of the use of different sentence patterns / structures in students' writing shows that students in the Experimental Group can use more different sentence patterns and sentence structures to express the writing content than that of the Control Group.The results of the experiment show that scaffolding English writing teaching model is an effective teaching method. It could improve students' writing proficiency and promote students to use more different kinds of sentence patterns /structures to express the writing content.This research gives us a lot of implications. This teaching method is worthy adopting, but how to apply the teaching model more effectively needs to be further discussed and studied.