The Application Of Scaffolding Theory To English Writing Teaching In Vocational College

According to the Basic Requirements for English Teaching in Higher Vocational Education(2009),the higher vocational students shall acquire five basic skills,such as,listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.Writing is an important scale to measure students' comprehensive competence of using language.However,English writing competence is always a weak spot of students in higher vocational college.In addition,there are still lots of problems in English writing teaching,such as,low teaching efficiency.Under the guidance of scaffolding theory,English writing teaching in higher vocational colleges focuses on the ”Proximal Development Zone” of the students,constructs an appropriate study scaffold for higher vocational students,which improves English writing competence of students.Therefore,this paper attempts to apply scaffolding theory to English writing teaching in higher vocational college,in order to improve students' English writing competence by providing scaffolds.With literature analysis,questionnaire and experiment,the author has carried on an empirical research in Xiamen Donghai Vocational College from March to July in 2018.The empirical instruments include two questionnaires and test papers for writing.The subjects of the study were 95 students from two classes of two freshmen classes.The author considers Class 1 of E-Business major as the experimental class,applying the scaffolding theory to English writing teaching,while Class 2 of E-Business major is regarded as the control class,adopting the traditional teaching mode in English writing teaching.This study aims to verify the following hypotheses: 1)Applying the scaffolding theory to English writing teaching in higher vocational college can improve students' English writing competence.2)Applying the scaffolding theory to English writing teaching in higher vocational college can arouse students' English writing interest.Based on the statistical analysis of experimental data and questionnaire data,the following conclusions can be drawn from this study:1.Applying the scaffolding theory to English writing teaching in higher vocationalcollege can improve students' English writing competence.There is no significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Class in English competence before the experiment,according to the results of pre-test(8.065,8.071)(p=0.857>0.05).After the experiment,the post-test score of the experimental class was higher than that of the control class(9.707>8.255)and there is significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Class(p=0.000< 0.05).In terms of specific score loss of each module,there is significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Class in score loss of following module: grammar/syntax,layout,words and style format.However,there is no significant difference between the Experimental Class and the Control Class in score loss of content module.2.Applying the scaffolding theory to English writing teaching in higher vocational college can arouse students' English writing interest.Thus,the relevant suggestions are put forward for teachers and students to improve the efficiency of English writing teaching in higher vocational college from the perspective of teaching procedure.