An Exploration On Peer Scaffolding In Group Interaction Of Senior English Writing Class

Writing,as one of the five elements of English learning,plays a very important role in high school English teaching,and it's the reflection of learners' integrated use of English knowledge.Although the traditional writing method can enable students to master writing skills and get high scores in a short time,it makes students lose their initiative in learning,and ignores how to cultivate and improve students' language thinking ability.The purpose of English writing teaching reform is to promote students'active learning,improve their interest and participation in English writing,so that all students can experience the process of group interaction learning and knowledge construction.During discussing,the peer comes to be an important resource of learning,and we are supposed to take full advantage of this resource and bring the role of peer scaffolding into full play in the writing class.As a new research field,peer scaffolding contains important value for us to study.However,the study at this aspect especially in writing class is quite few until now.The purpose of this study is to get some effective ways to mine the value of peer scaffolding in group interaction of senior English writing classroom,and help the teachers start to pay attention to the peer scaffolding.This study takes mediation,internalization and Zone of Proximal Development theory as the framework,uses classroom recordings,questionnaires,and after-class interviews to study the role of peer scaffolding in high school English writing class and the impact of peer scaffolding on students' language output.The subjects are from two classes of the same grade in a high school in Fengjie County,Chongqing.This study lasted for 6 weeks,the author started a writing class every other week,and the two classes completed three different compositions.Before each writing,the students had an interactive discussion about 10 minutes according to the writing requirements.After the discussion,students completed the composition according to the requirements.A total of 510 minutes of students' discussion recordings were collected in this study,and all of the recordings were transcribed.This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the following questions:(1)What is the current situation of scaffolding provided by peers during group interaction in Senior English writing class?(2)What are the functions of peer scaffolding in group interaction in Senior English writing class?(3)How does peer scaffolding affect the students' language output?The results of this study are as follows.(1)Students often use peer scaffolding in English writing classes and most of the students insist that their peers will provide help to them when they are in trouble.This means that peer scaffolding exists universally in English writing class group interaction in senior high schools.(2)The role of peer scaffolding involves seven aspects and they are:increasing participation,providing vocabulary,providing perspective,correcting misrepresentation,simplifying the task,direction maintenance,and providing affective support.(3)As students are still in the ascendant stage of language development and have insufficient mastery of the target language,they may output wrong language forms in peer interaction.This study highlights the positive role that peer scaffolding played in developing interactive dialogue as well as group members' language proficiency.This study aims to provide some teaching implications for Senior English writing teachings,but there are still some limitations in this study due to the limited research subjects and research time.