An Action Research On English Writing Teaching In Rural Junior Middle School Based On Scaffolding Instruction Model

The overall goal of English curriculum in the compulsory stage is stated clearly that through English teaching teachers should develop students' integrated skills to use English.English writing is one of the integrated skills.But most of rural students are still poor in writing which is their poorest part.Taking the author's school,a junior middle school in Shitan town in Zengcheng,as an example,students show less interest in writing,the low writing marks lead to a vicious spiral.Therefore,how to stimulate students' writing interest and improve their writing ability become an urgent task as well as a big challenge in rural schools.Scaffolding instruction is an advanced teaching model based on Constructivism and Zone of Proximal Development.Scholars abroad and domestic has been verified that it can help students form knowledge framework and build up a bridge between the new knowledge and the old one so that students can master knowledge systematically.But this advanced approach is seldom applied in rural junior writing teaching.So it is significant to put scaffolding instruction into practice in rural middle schools.The author hopes that from this research some enlightenment and help can be gained for the rural teachers to teach English writing.This study included 43 participants from a class of Grade Seven.Writing teaching was given every two weeks and the whole study lasted for 16 weeks.The research was designed to probe into the following research questions:1)Can Scaffolding instruction model stimulate rural junior middle school students' interest in English writing?2)Can Scaffolding instruction model improve students' English writing ability in rural junior middle school? If yes,in what aspects?From the pre-test and pre-questionnaire,problems were found: most of students in rural junior school are not interested in English writing and even dread of it;meanwhile writing teaching is lack of strategy.Due to above two problems,the writer carried out three stages of action research on the basis of scaffolding instruction.In the first stage: set positive psychology scaffold.The author designed a sample lesson and used multimedia courseware,pictures,videos and other teaching methods to help students get familiar with scaffolding instruction.This aimed to dismember writing difficulties,eliminate students' fear in writing so as to gradually improve students' writing interest.In the second stage: set strategy scaffold.Based on students' interest improvement,the author started to teach writing skills,including drawing up the outline of articles,the basic sentence pattern training,and the usage of conjunctions.According to data analysis and reflection to mid-test writing papers,the author found that the students were not clear about rating standard.In the third stage:set an evaluation scaffold.Peer evaluation was required to get students understand rating standard and know how to get higher writing scores.After three stages of action research,compared the analysis of pre-test,mid-test and post-test,the data proved that scaffolding instruction did improve students' writing ability in my class.Through the analysis of questionnaire and interviews,the data showed that scaffolding instruction can stimulate students' interest and enhance their confidence.