A Study On Application Of Scaffolding Theory In English Writing In Senior High School

With the society and communication developing,English,which is not only a tool for people to acquire knowledge but also an important access to communication,is attracting more and more attention from people.The New English Curriculum Standards(2001)required that students can finish a writing according to the given information.The full mark of English subject is 150 points in the entrance exam of university,in which the full mark of Writing in English subject is 25 points,which takes up about 16%.So English writing is regarded as a very important language skill in foreign language teaching and also a useful means of communication.In fact,English learning is so hard for some students that many of them always consider it as a huge barrier in the learning road,and they especially are not into learning writing in English,because of anxiety and attitude.Scaffolding teaching is a kind of teaching model developed from constructivism and based on the theory of zone of Proximal development.It focuses on the students' self-construction and meaningful automatic learning under the guidance and assistance of a teacher.So student's writing can benefit greatly from scaffolding instruction.The purpose of this study was to examine whether scaffolding theory was effective on improving students' English writing ability and writing proficiency,two research questions were to be answered as follows:1.Can the application of scaffolding theory improve Senior high School students' writing achievements?2.Can the application of scaffolding theory improve Senior high School students' interests and attitudes in English writing?This study adopted some experimental instruments to conduct the experiment,such as pre-test,post-test,questionnaire.121 subjects were chosen from Zhangye N0:2 Senior High School.60 were in Class 5 Senior 2 and 61 subjects were in Class 15 Senior 2.Class 5 was chosen as experiment class(EC),and Class 5 was chosen as control class(CC).The data was analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The pre-test and post-test showed that the performance of the EC was better than that of the CC.The results demonstrated that the writing achievements in EC had a significant difference before and after the experiment,while there were no significant difference in CC.So the findings supported the hypothesis that Scaffolding could improve learners' writing improvement.The results in the analysis of questionnaires suggested that Scaffolding in writing helped to improve learners' interest and attitude in writing.The learners considered it a better way,and they are content with the scaffolding in writing.Therefore,it is important to use scaffolding theory to Senior High School students to support them in their studying.It is obvious that Scaffolding Instruction could be useful in English writing classes in senior high schools.Meanwhile,these findings also gave important implications for our English teaching and learning in senior high schools.