An Action Research On Application Of Scaffolding Instruction To English Writing Teaching In Junior High School

English writing ability is one of the comprehensive language application abilities that junior high school students should have.It is the ability of junior high school students to create new discourses in written form by using their learned language and cultural knowledge.However,at present,junior high school students' English writing ability is relatively weak.There are many problems in their written English trainings.For instance,they lack the competences of choosing words and making sentences,using grammar and organizing discourses.Given this,the author attempts to introduce scaffolding instruction into junior high school English writing teaching to improve students' attitude towards writing and English writing ability.The author will start with the following two questions for further exploration.1.How to apply scaffolding instruction to junior high school English writing teaching?2.What influence does scaffolding instruction have on junior high school students' attitude towards writing and English writing ability?The author mainly uses three instruments: papers,interview outline and teaching journals.The author adopts action research method to research on 50 students in Class 4 Grade 8 of Soudengzhan Town Middle School in Chuanying District,Jilin City for nearly four months.Before starting the action research,the author finds out the problems that students have in English writing trainings by analyzing the preliminary papers and teaching journals.In the first round of action research,the author focuses on the research questions and designs the action plan,making a preliminary exploration for the application model of scaffolding instruction in English writing.On the basis of evaluating and reflecting on the first round of action research,the author adjusts the action plan and implements the second round of teaching action research,and summarizes and reflects on this research based on the data analysis of the two rounds of action research.Through this research,the author explored a scaffolding-based English writing teaching model: before writing class,teachers should analyze students' present writing conditions and accurately determine their Zone of Proximal Development;in writing class,teachers should follow the process of scaffolding writing teaching,that is,follow the teaching sequence of “creating a situation,importing a topic----building the scaffolds,leading an inquiry----collaborative learning,peer coaching----removing the scaffolds,independent inquiry----effectiveness evaluation,multiple feedback” to instruct students to use different scaffolds in writing.Through a comparative analysis of the pre-test and post-test results,it was found that students' writing errors in word level,lexical level,syntactic level and discourse level were distinctly decreased.Obvious improvements were found in students' lexical competence,grammatical competence and discourse competence.In other words,scaffolding-based English writing teaching model can significantly enhance students' English writing ability.By analyzing the teaching journals and interview results,it was found that scaffolding-based English writing teaching model can also remarkably improve students' attitude towards writing and their enthusiasm for writing.The author also provides teaching suggestions for teachers about the application model of scaffolding instruction in English writing,hoping to provide some new enlightenment to solve the writing problems of English learners.