The Application Of Scaffolding Instruction Model To English Writing In Lower-grade Junior High School

English writing is a complicated language output skill. Writing gives expression to students’ overall language ability. It is considered to be one of the most important parts of EFL. However, nowadays, the writing ability of junior high school students is disconcerting. The teaching of writing in junior high schools is also a weak point of language teaching. In order to meet the need of the psychological development of lower-grade students in junior high schools, a more suitable teaching approach should be introduced in daily teaching classes.Scaffolding instruction is a teaching strategy based on the constructivism theory, which originates from “the Zone of Proximal Development”. This kind of instruction can help students create a platform to improve their writing skills and their writing ability, and thus arouses their interest in writing.This study applies the scaffolding instruction to the teaching of English writing for lower-grade students in junior high schools. The study conducts an experiment among students from two classes in Grade Seven of Shanghai Qing Zhong Junior High School in order to explore whether the scaffolding instruction approach can improve their writing ability and whether the result will be the same among students of different English levels. The subjects of the experiment are the two classes in Grade Seven which the author of this thesis teaches, one being the experiment class while the other comparison class. For the experiment class, the scaffolding instruction approach is adopted in the teaching of writing and for the comparison class, the traditional teaching of writing is used. For both classes, the same textbook and the same number of classes every week are guaranteed. The study takes advantage of the research methods of questionnaires and writing tests to collect and analyze the data before and after the experiment. In addition, there is also a sample lesson in this thesis, in which we can find the concrete steps of how to apply the scaffolding instruction to the teaching of writing.This study adopts SPSS 19.0 to compare and analyze the data collected from the pre-test and post-test. It can be found that the two classes have no significant difference in their writing scores from the pre-test. However, the significant difference exists in their scores from the post-test, which illustrates that scaffolding instruction approach improves the writing ability of the students from lower-grade in junior high schools. Moreover, this approach can exert different influence on the students of different English levels. From the results of the questionnaires before and after the experiments, it can also be seen that the students know how to write and have more confidence in writing.Owing to the limited time of the experiment, which only lasted one term, there are still some drawbacks of this study in terms of the number of the subjects and the steps of the application. Therefore, the conclusion of this study needs to be further improved.