Effects Of Instructional Scaffolding On College English Writing: An Experimental Study

The thesis aims to study the effects of instructional scaffolding on collegeEnglish writing. Based on Vygotsky’s social development theory, Bruner’sconstructivist theory and Krashen’s input hypothesis, scaffolding instruction employsthe cooperation and interaction between teachers and students and students andstudents to develop fully students’ initiative, potential and creativity and finallysucceed to independently construct their own knowledge. This study is an experimentto explore roles of scaffolding in the English writing for those who are non-Englishmajors but have an English writing course, and tries to answer the following threequestions: What kinds of difficulties do students have in English writing? In whichaspect is the scaffolding approach more effective than the product writing approach?And what are the students’ responses to the scaffolding teaching?This experiment adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods to answerthree questions above. The quantitative study included a pre-questionnaire survey, apre-test and a post-test. The qualitative research was mainly class observation and apost-questionnaire. The participants were65students from two second-year intactclasses in Business School of Guangxi University for Nationalities, and theexperiment was conducted in the first semester of the2013-2014academic schoolyear. In the experimental class (EC), the scaffolding treatment was applied, and in thecontrol class (CC) the product approach was used. Before the experiment, a pre-testwas implemented to make sure they were at the same writing level. Then, thepre-questionnaire was done in EC to investigate the students’ attitudes and needstowards writing and their writing strategies and problems. The scaffoldings were setup through class activities to help students write based on the pre-questionnaire.Meanwhile, class observation was carried out during both classes to know their performance. After the experiment, the post-test was conducted in both classes to testthe effects.According to the data analysis, the main problems in writing are poor vocabulary,grammar, and inadequate content. The post-test shows that the five aspects (content,wording, grammar, organization and discourse) in EC and the three aspects (wording,organization and discourse) in CC have improved, but the scores of EC are muchhigher that those of CC. Besides, in terms of content and grammar aspect in CC, theprogress they made is not significant. In light of the class observation, most ofstudents in EC could finish writing tasks actively and positively in lively atmosphere.While CC students were not so active to communicate little with the teacher, thus thelearning atmosphere was a little dull. From the post-questionnaire, most of ECstudents hold positive attitudes towards the scaffolding, and they are more interestedin English writing than before. Therefore, it can be concluded that scaffoldings playan effective role in writing and improve students’ writing ability, which providesuseful reference for English writing teaching and future study.