The Application Of Scaffolding Teaching To English Writing In Senior High Schools

With the development of society,English plays a more and more important role in our daily life and work.English writing,one of the five basic skills,is the core of students' integrated language competence and plays an important role in English learning.However,in practical English teaching in senior high schools,English writing is not satisfactory.Nowadays,traditional teaching methods are widely used in senior high schools,and most teachers only pay more attention to the result of students' writing and neglect the process of writing.In addition,due to a lack of writing skills,students have no high interest in writing,and their English writing level is low.The study focuses on scaffolding approach in teaching English writing based on Constructivism Theory and Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD).It gives students necessary support and guidance to make them solve the problem by themselves in the course of writing and try to find out whether scaffolding approach can improve students' English writing level and independent learning.This study was carried out in a senior high school and 60 senior high school students from two classes in grade 2 were chosen as participants.One class was chosen as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The pre-test of English writing was carried out in the two classes to ensure that English writing competence of the two classes was similar.Meanwhile,the questionnaires were distributed to the two classes to explore their attitude to English writing,teaching method in English writing and the independent learning in English writing.During the experiment,scaffolding approach was applied in the experimental class and the product approach teaching method was for the control class.After the experiment,the post-questionnaire and post-test of English writing were carried out in the two classes to check the effect of scaffolding teaching method on English writing.All the data of the experiment were put into SPSS18.0 to get the result.After one term's research,according to the results of the experiment,the scaffolding approach in English writing is more effective than the product approach in different aspects.It can improve students' English writing level and independent learning ability,especially it can enable students to enrich the content and the discourse.Teachers in senior high schools are suggested to apply scaffolding approach which puts students in center to improve students' English writing and independent learning.