A Study Of Scaffolding Instruction In Middle School English Writing Teaching:Based On Error Analysis

English writing is quite important to both English learning and English teaching.It requires students to turn their experience and thought into written language.It shows students' comprehensive competence clearly.However,English writing is always a weak point to Chinese students.They usually repeat same errors again and again,and often get slow progress and low grade in English writing.This thesis attempts to combine error analysis with scaffolding instruction to help teachers in Chinese middle school to cultivate and improve students' English writing capacity.To help teachers to lead students to find their own errors and decrease the errors by themselves,this thesis is based on error analysis and scaffolding theories.Error analysis theory believes that the analysis of students' errors can improve students' learning ability,because errors can help teachers know more about the students' learning process.Scaffolding instruction holds that teachers should set up a variety of scaffolds to help to transfer students' “actual development level” to “potential development level”.With the development of students' writing capacity,teachers should gradually evacuate the scaffolds in the later stages of teaching to cultivate students' independent learning and writing capacity.The author takes a class of students in a middle school in Guangzhou as the subject to conduct the research in English writing teaching.The author first collects and analyzes errors in middle school students' English writing in the pretest.She then designs activities for scaffolding instruction according to the error analysis.After that,she collects and analyzes the errors that the students' usually make in their writings.The author hopes that this research will explore the impact of scaffolding instruction based on error analysis on English writing teaching,and by the help of scaffolding instruction,how the students can find and correct errors and avoid repeating the same errors,and whether it can improve students' English writing capacity and teachers' teaching ability.After the research,the author collects and analyzes the results of the writing tests and interviews.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Interlingual errors caused by the negative transfer of the mother tongue are the biggest problem for middle school students' English writing.(2)Students can find out,correct and avoid errors in their English writing with the guidance of scaffolding instruction based on error analysis.With the decrease of errors,students' writing capacity and writing confidence also has improved to a certain degree.(3)With the guidance of scaffolding instruction,the interactions between teachers and students as well as students and students create a fertile learning environment.Students can solve problems and learn lessons from each other during the class.According to the results of this research,scaffolding instruction based on error analysis can effectively help Chinese middle school students find out and correct their errors in English writing process,and improve their writing ability.This teaching method can also help teachers in China improve their writing teaching.However,due to the constraints of time and various factors,there are still many shortcomings in this research.The author of this thesis only hopes that it would attract the attention of English teachers in Chinese middle school and promote the reform of English writing teaching in China.