Application Of Scaffolding Theory To The Teaching Of Genre-based English Writing In Senior High Schools

It is well-known that English writing teaching is an important part of English teaching in high schools,as it is a criterion to judge the comprehensive ability of students' writing and the quality of English teaching. However, unstable language foundation, confused genre awareness, and lack of writing strategies restrict the development of students' writing ability and creativity. Although genre-based teaching method lays emphasis on the analysis and imitation of model essay, its teaching activity is boring and rigid, and pays less attention to students' creativity. The writing teaching method based on the Scaffolding theory, which helps to decomposing the teaching tasks, constructing integral conception step by step, enrich the links of genre-based writing teaching and develop students' writing potential,and it has complementary advantages which can avoid the disadvantage of genre-based teaching approach. In view of the above, the author puts forward a hypothesis to integrate the Scaffold theory to the genre-based teaching approaches, making their respective advantages complementary to each other so as to enforce high school students' awareness about genre, heighten their interest of writing, and cultivate their divergent thinking.Based on constructivism learning theory and theory of zone of proximal development, according to English Curriculum Standards and the requirements for high school students' English writing from "High School English Examination Outline", the study focuses on how to set up teaching scaffolding in process-genre writing teaching links appropriately. Meanwhile, it also focuses on how to apply different teaching scaffolding to the following genre writing teachings: argumentation, expository writing, narration writing and practical writing respectively. After applying the scaffolding theory to process-genre writing teaching in Longchi Senior High School in Hunan Province, both students and teachers were interviewed afterwards. The results show that the students' enthusiasm of writing, awareness about the genre, and the creative thinking have been greatly improved to certain degree. The teacher's strategy of teaching has become more flexible and systematic. Therefore, it can be proved that this research hypothesis is feasible in senior high school English writing teaching. It can also be used as reference to improve the quality of senior high school's English writing teaching. As the author of this thesis is still immature in academic and teaching, there must be some shortcomings need to be improved, such as, the exploration on the usage of teaching scaffold in writing conception and writing assessment are more mature than independent writing, the usage of teaching scaffold still needs a further research.