An Action Research On The Application Of Scaffolding Theory To The Teaching Of English Continuation Writing In Senior High School

Through further deepening the Sociocultural Theory,Professor Wang Chuming put forword Continuation Task Theory in the early 21 st century.Continuation Task based on“continuous discourse” gives full play to the role of text in promoting learning,and produces an upward leveling effect through the interaction between the text and learners,which effectively improves students’ language application ability.Combined with National English Curriculum Standards for general High School(2017 Edition,2020Revision),Continuation Task also puts forward specific requirements for students’ writing ability.Teachers should focus on cultivating students’ ability to interpret textual information,to imitate and use language creatively,to plan a story and the ability to develop reasonable imagination based on text content.Through teaching,the author found that students’ writing situation is not optimistic.They appear to be afraid of difficulty,have low interest,and do not pay attention to text reading.Besides,their writing motivation is not strong.In terms of ability,they do not pay attention to the reading of the text,pile up the contents by reciting sentence patterns,and use a lot of basic vocabularies.How to carry on the writing teaching in Continuation Task effectively has become a difficult problem.Scaffolding was proposed by Wood on the basis of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and developed as a five-step teaching model under Scaffolding Theory,which uses dialogue and interaction between teachers and students,students and students to help students achieve the goal of learning and achieve upward promotion.Therefore,the author proposes to apply the Scaffolding Theory to Continuation Task.On the basis of the five-step teaching link,the author builds the scaffolders of scene,content,language,structure,thinking and evaluation to promote learning.The purpose is to improve students’ writing cognition and improve their writing ability.In this study,the author focuses on solving the following three problems: 1.How to design teaching activities in Continuation Task based on Scaffolding Theory? 2.What is the influence of Continuation Task teaching based on Scaffolding Theory on students’ cognitive ability(attitude and motivation)? 3.What is the influence of Continuation Task teaching based on Scaffolding Theory on students’ writing ability(the ability to interpret textual information,to imitate and use language creatively,to plan a story and the ability to develop reasonable imagination based on text content)?The author selected 68 students from a class in Grade two of a senior high school in Hebei Province as the participants of an action research of two rounds in three months.During this period,two questionnaire surveys were conducted to observe the change of students’ cognitive ability towards Continuation Task,three follow-up writing tests and stratified sampling interviews were conducted to observe the change of students’ writing ability.The author combined the obtained data with SPSS 26.0 and Excel for analysis.The results of the two questionnaires showed that the students’ attitude towards Continuation Task changed and their internal motivation was further improved.The results of the writing test showed a 3.82 increase from 11.4 to 15.22.Students’ ability to interpret textual information,to imitate and use language creatively,to plan a story and the ability to develop reasonable imagination based on text content increased 0.9706,1.3382,1.0295 and 0.4706.The paired sample T test shows that Sig(two-tailed)are all 000<0.05,which is significant.Combined with the interview content,the author found that Continuation Task under the guidance of scaffolding theory can effectively improve students’ writing ability.As a new type of writing,it is the focus of many scholars and teachers’ research.There are few studies on the combination of Continuation Task to Scaffolding Theory.This action research proves that the teaching mode of Continuation Task under the guidance of Scaffolding Theory is effective.However,due to the limited time and the limited number of people in this action research,it is still necessary to further study whether the Scaffolding Theory can be applied to the teaching Continuation Task in a larger scope of teaching practice.This article only hopes to provide some ideas and inspiration for Continuation Task in senior high school.