Peer Scaffolding Under Teachers' Guidance And Its Effects On Junior High School English Writing

With the advancement of China,people are more inclined to cultivate the ability of expressing English.However,most of researches focus on the ability of speaking rather than writing.Especially for these junior high school students,they do badly in controlling the ability of writing.Junior high school students can confront with various kinds of difficulties,such as,the anxiety of writing and the difficulty of using words and phrases.Meanwhile,teachers emphasized more on mechanical knowledge input and neglected students' learning autonomy,which caused an oppressive classroom atmosphere.In recent years,scaffolding has received a lot of attention.The concept of scaffolding originated from the architecture field.Bruner(1976)initially applied this concept to teaching filed.Scaffolding refers to teachers will provide certain assistance or support to make students get through zone of proximal development and reach the teaching objectives.The scaffolding can be divided into teacher scaffolding and peer scaffolding in terms of different research objects.The role of teacher scaffolding has attracted lots of researchers' attention,while fewer people explore the types and roles of peer scaffolding from the perspective of the Constructivism Theory.The empirical researches of how to employ peer scaffolding have been discussed little in a specific teaching context.The research which based on adopting the combination of quantitative and qualitative method aims to study peers how to provide peer scaffolding before writing and promote the improvement of students' writing achievements.The empirical subjects in this research are the second year in junior high school from Jiangxi province(43 students in Class Seven and 45 students in Class Eight).The research lasted from one month.Class seven adopted the peer scaffolding under teachers' guidance and class eight used the traditional teaching method in writing class.Paired-sample t test and Independent t test in SPSS.17 have been employed to explore whether this teaching method has a great influence on students' writing achievements.In addition,the author recorded the discussion and interview of two groups at random.After that the author transcribed the recording content according to research content and research object to solve the following two research questions:Question 1: What are effects of peer scaffolding under teachers' guidance onjunior high school students' English writing performance?Question 2: What are the features of junior high school students' peer scaffolding under the guidance of teachers?After analyzing the two research questions,the author made the following conclusion:First of all,the writing achievements in experimental class have been improved obviously after the research,that is,the average scores of the writing achievements in experimental class has increased from 11.95 to 13.33.The value of paired-sample t test of class seven is 0.00,which is obviously less than 0.05.However,the average scores of the writing achievements in control class have only increased from 10.78 to11.67.The value of paired-sample t test of class seven is 0.07,which is obviously higher than 0.05.The results showed that the peer scaffolding under teachers' guidance had a significant influence on students' writing achievements.What's more,the result of independent t test also indicated that the writing achievements of two classes had a distinguished difference.Secondly,Based on the former division of peer scaffolding in type and function,the author took the data down through analyzing the recordings and interview,which presented that joint regard and praise/encouragement appeared and were used again and again in two groups' discussion.Meanwhile,during the analysis of the function of peer scaffolding,feedback,providing vocabulary and direction maintenance were more distinguished in that the two groups have always maintained their goals to provide feedback and vocabularies.The research can be used to change the traditional and monotonous English teaching class which is teacher-oriented,and it can also assist students to employ peer scaffolding to make a great progress in English ability.The effective combination of teachers' guidance and peer scaffolding can enable teachers and students to explore and carry out the high-efficient teaching method.