An Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To Theme-based English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing is not only a complex process of language output but also a linguistic internalization and creative activity,and it can show students’ comprehensive language competence.Writing is considered to be one of the most important parts of NMET,however,it is also a weak part of language teaching in middle schools.Most teachers still adopt the Product Approach,a traditional teaching method which focuses on imitation and the final products as well as the correctness of the grammatical structures.But this approach neglects the possible difficulties students would meet during the writing process and the help that should be given to students in writing.How to improve students’ writing proficiency and how to stimulate students’ interest and motivation have become urgent issues to tackle.Scaffolding Instruction,as the core teaching mode of Constructivism,derives from the Zone of Proximal Development,which can provide timely and appropriate assistance when students have difficulties.During the learning process,students decompose the complex learning tasks step by step with the help of teachers or other more capable peers as well as relying on the concept frameworks to accomplish the tasks.This teaching mode provides theoretical guidance for English writing teaching in senior high school.Based on Constructivism and the Zone of Proximal Development Theory,the study combines the textbooks,integrates the writing materials of the same topic,decomposes the complex writing tasks and sets up different scaffolds according to students’ ZPD to form a theme-based writing teaching mode which consists of vocabulary,content and structure scaffolds.The study tries to answer the following three questions: a.Can the theme-based writing based on Scaffolding Instruction stimulate students’ interest,alleviate their writing anxiety as well as increasing their writing confidence in writing? b.Can the application of Scaffolding Instruction to theme-based writing improve senior high school students’ overall writing proficiency? c.In which aspects can it help improve the students’ writing proficiency?Two parallel classes of Senior Three in Tianshui No.1 Middle School,Gansu Province are selected randomly as the research subjects,one as controlled class and the other as experimental class.The two classes use the same teaching materials and are taught by the same teacher.Before the teaching experiment,a background questionnaire is used to find out the current teaching situations,meanwhile,the pre-test shows that the two classes are at the same level in English writing.Then based on the topics of Module 1 to Module 8 in New Senior English for China Student’s Books(PEP),a one-semester teaching experiment with scaffolding writing method is performed in experimental class.At the end of the experiment,a post-test is carried out in both classes,and a feedback questionnaire is used to investigate the attitude towards Scaffolding Instruction and ten students are chosen randomly to be interviewed.Finally,the experimental data is collected and analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative ways.The study shows that in the process of scaffolding writing teaching,the interactive activities can motivate students’ writing interest.And the different levels of scaffolding and cooperative learning can alleviate their writing anxiety as well as increasing their writing confidence.Meanwhile,textbook materials and a quantity of comprehensible input can help students learn how to use the topic-related words and expressions,and useful sentence patterns to express their views correctly,which improves students’ writing performance to some extent.Especially,from the aspect of students’ using topic-related phrases,complex sentences and discourse devices,it can be concluded that setting up suitable scaffolds based on students’ ZPD is helpful to improve students’ writing overall competence.