A Case Study Of The Effectiveness Of Scaffolding In An English Writing Class Of Chinese High School Students

Despite a demand for students’ acquiring greater proficiency in English writing in China,the teaching of ESL writing in Chinese high schools has been handicapped in many ways.It’s common that EFL teachers do not spend relatively sufficient time giving instructions on writing,and the ESL writing instruction falls short of the expectation to develop students’ competence and strategy use in written communication.Students find it hard to develop ideas pertinent to writing prompts and show inertia to act on the corrective feedback from the teachers and diminished interest and motivation for writing.“Scaffolding”,which is a pedagogical notion developed from the sociocultural theory,by Vygotsky,facilitates students’ stepped approaching of discoveries in learning and are closely related to the cognitive activities underpinning the students’ use of writing processes.The sociocultural theory also provides a promising perspective on the dialogue interaction between teachers and students where corrective feedback is delivered.The common goal of scaffolding to nourish learner interest in the tasks is naturally relevant to the observed loss of interest and motivation in students regarding writing.Unfortunately,the existent scholarship on scaffolding in ESL writing instruction is mostly concerned with peer collaboration,with less attention paid to scaffolding used in teachers’ counselling to students.There is also a lack of systematic studies on scaffolding’s impact on students’ attitudes toward writing tasks.Furthermore,the Chinese scholarship is characterized by inferences made on the basis of students’ overall scores in writing tests and the students’ writing processes generally fall outside the purview of such studies.With an eye to addressing these issues,the present study applied scaffolding to an ESL writing class of Chinese high school students to study the effectiveness of scaffolding in relation to certain topics of interest,especially the controversy over corrective feedback.The study is concerned with three research questions: Does scaffolding contribute to the lexical and grammatical accuracy and variation of students’ writings? Does it improve the students’ attitudes toward writing tasks? Can it help the students optimize their writing processes?Four grade-ten students from different high schools were recruited into an experimental two-month ESL writing course consisting of eight lessons,with the course content consistent with the students’ high school curriculum and writing prompts adopted in the English test of the National College Entrance Examination.In this qualitative study,the four students served as cases under investigation and were exposed to the teacher’s scaffolding offered in instruction and feedback giving.Error analysis and discourse analysis were applied to describe and compare the students’ writing samples in terms of error frequencies and discourse development.Research instruments including semi-structured interviews and video analysis were used to investigate the students’ writing processes,writing strategies and attitudes towards ESL writing,In the meanwhile,the classroom discourse in the eight lessons was recorded and transcribed,with the resulting corpus coded and interpreted.The results show that lexical and grammatical errors in the writings of the student’s have gradually decreased,indicating improved accuracy.At the same time,the number of subordinate clauses,cohesive devices and advanced words used in the writing samples have increased,indicating that the readability of the students’ compositions has been enhanced.According to the analysis for students’ remarks made during the interviews,the students’ interests in writing have improved,as is suggested by the students’ more positive appreciation of the writing tasks.In the meanwhile,students demonstrated new behaviors such as analyzing and brainstorming ideas for topics of their writings,planning and outlining compositions,revising their writings locally and globally by themselves,which are signs of the modification of their original writing processes.In light of the findings,this thesis has reached the conclusion that scaffolding has the potential to improve the lexical and grammatical accuracy of the English writing of the students,enhance their attitudes toward English writing;and sophisticate their writing processes.