A Study On The Effects Of Scaffolding Instruction On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Anxiety And Performance

Writing plays an extremely important role in English learning,and it is also one of the most difficult points in English teaching.Compared with native language writing,foreign language writing is a more complex psychological process.Learners often feel anxious and nervous about the English writing task,whose problems are manifested in content,organization,grammar and so on.Therefore,it is urgent to explore effective writing teaching methods to alleviate learners’ writing anxiety and improve their writing performance.Previous researchers found that scaffolding instruction can effectively improve learners’ English writing performance by building various kinds of scaffolds within learners’ Zone of Proximal Development.However,the existing studies mainly take the effect of scaffolding on learners’ English writing performance as the focus.Only a few investigate the effect of scaffolding on learners’ English writing anxiety.Therefore,the present study applies scaffolding instruction to writing teaching at a senior high school in order to investigate the effects of scaffolding instruction on English writing anxiety and English writing performance.Specifically,it intends to address the following three questions:(1)What’s the current situation of senior high school students’ English writing anxiety?(2)How does scaffolding instruction influence senior high school students’ English writing anxiety?(3)How does scaffolding instruction influence senior high school students’ English writing performance?The present study selects 115 students from two parallel classes in Grade 1 at a senior high school in Zhejiang Province as research subjects,including 57 students in experimental class(EC)and 58 students in control class(CC).According to their first English test results in senior high school,there exists no significant difference in overall English level between EC and CC.Pre-questionnaires and pre-tests are conducted to guarantee there is no significant difference in English writing anxiety and performance between EC and CC before the experiment.During the 10-week teaching experiment,the scaffolding instruction is adopted in EC while traditional product approach is applied in CC.All subjects are required to finish post-questionnaires and post-tests after teaching experiment.In addition,10 students from EC are randomly chosen to take part in the semi-structured interview for the purpose of investigating their attitude to scaffolding instruction.Major findings are summarized as follows.(1)Senior high school students’ overall English writing anxiety is at the medium level.Most students are in the medium-level anxiety group.Some students suffer from high-level anxiety while only few students are in the low-level anxiety group.As for the four specific factors,the Avoidance Behavior is at the high level while the other three factors including Lack of Confidence,Conceiving Anxiety and Classroom Teaching Anxiety are at the medium level.The correlation between overall English writing anxiety and four factors respectively is statistically significant.But the correlation between gender and overall English writing anxiety is not significant.There is no significant difference between male and female.(2)Scaffolding instruction plays a significant role in alleviating students’ overall English writing anxiety.And compared with traditional product approach,it proves to be more effective in alleviating students’ Classroom Teaching Anxiety,Conceiving Anxiety and Lack of Confidence.The reason lies in the design of various scaffolds including content,structural and language scaffolds within students’ Zone of Proximal Development for the purpose of helping students make a good preparation before independent writing.Besides,cooperative learning and peer evaluation can efficiently build up students’ self-confidence and alleviate their writing anxiety.However,under the pressure of exams,students are busy learning many subjects and practice English writing mainly for higher scores.It is difficult to make students form the habit of recording their daily life in English and actively practice English writing after class in a short time.Therefore,scaffolding instruction has limited positive influence on alleviating Avoidance Behavior.(3)Under scaffolding instruction,students make significant gains in overall English writing performance.Scaffolding instruction helps students get notable improvement in content,organization,language use and mechanics of their compositions.The reason lies in the construction of content,structure and language scaffolds.In addition,cooperative learning enables students to pay attention to and learn the brilliant expressions in partners’ compositions.Besides,peer evaluation provides opportunities to find peer’s language errors,pay attention to and correct their own language errors.However,it is found that scaffolding instruction can hardly improve vocabulary.Vocabulary accumulation is a long process,which makes it difficult for students to accumulate complex vocabulary and effectively use it in writing in a short time.In practical English writing teaching,teachers should pay attention to the following points:(1)Teachers should combine the actual teaching content and build up appropriate scaffolds within students’ Zone of Proximal Development.When students’ ability develops,the scaffolds should fade gradually.(2)During the cooperative learning and peer evaluation,teachers should pay close attention to students in order to provide support when necessary.(3)To build up students’ self-confidence and alleviate their writing anxiety,teachers should create a lively and harmonious classroom atmosphere and encourage students when evaluating their compositions.Of course,there exist limitations in the present study as to the experimental period,research subjects and writing genres.And further studies are needed to extend teaching experiment time,contain more students from different grades in senior high school and use other English writing genres to explore the effects of scaffolding instruction.