A Study On Employment Of Scaffolding Instruction For Topic-centred English Writing In Senior High Schools

Writing is an internalized process which reflects students' comprehensive abilities.English Language Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)points out“Language skills consist of listening,speaking,reading,writing skills and the comprehensive utilization ability of the four skills.The four skills can affect each other in the process of language learning.” However,teachers often neglect to cultivate students' comprehensive English-using ability in senior high schools.The teaching status has affected students' interests and attitude in writing,and even affects the writing process and results.This situation deserves our attention and reflection.With the purpose to check whether the application of the scaffolding instruction to the English writing teaching can really enhance the students writing capability or not,the author mainly focused her study on the two following questions.(1)Can the scaffolding instruction applied to the topic-based English writing in senior high schools arouse students' writing interests,if yes,how?(2)What are the effects of the topic-based scaffolding instruction on the senior high students' English writing achievement and habits? By using the research methods of questionnaire,experiment and interview,the author tried to explore how to effectively guide the teaching of topic-based writing in senior high schools under the guidance of scaffolding instructions.Totally,99 subjects in this research were selected from the two senior classes of Grade One in Datong Foreign Language School of Shanxi Province.Class Two had 50 students and was regarded as the experimental class(EC),while Class Five with49 students was selected as the control class(CC).The author adopted scaffolding instructions in EC,while employed the traditional writing model in CC.After the experiment,the author made some analyses of the related data by using SPSS 22.0 and also interviewed some teachers and students to further verify the research results of experiment.The research experiment of scaffolding instructions on the English topic-based writing lasted for about one semester,and the research procedure in EC included the following stages:building up scaffolds,creating the situation,independent exploration,cooperative learning and making evaluation.After the experiment,the relevant data were analyzed by SPSS22.0,and the independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test were adopted to attest the significance level of the test scores of EC and CC.After the comparative analyses of the results of questionnaires,pre-test,post-test and the interviews of both teachers and students,the author finally draws a conclusion that the scaffold instructions in the topic-based writing teaching can not only arouse the students' writing interests,but also greatly improve their writing abilities and achievement.Finally,the pedagogical implication was presented and some reflections on how to implement the scaffold instructions in the topic-based writing teaching are provided.