A Study On The Effects Of Scaffolding Theory-Based Continuation Task Teaching On Senior High School Students’ Writing Achievements

The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 Edition)classifies language proficiency as an important component of the core qualities of the English subject,and the ability to express oneself in writing as a direct expression of language proficiency has gained the attention of scholars at home and abroad.Moreover,to better develop senior high school students’ language comprehension and expression skills,continuation task appeared for the first time in 2020 in the English college entrance examination in Hubei province and occupied an important place.It emphasizes the integration of reading and writing by providing senior high school students with a short text and asking them to complete a logical,well-plotted,and structured short essay.In addition,continuation task also places new demands on senior high school students’ overall skills,including the ability to control the structure of discourse,to grasp key information,and use language with accuracy and richness.However,in actual writing,teachers usually adopt the approach of presenting examples,analyzing them,and accumulating good words and sentences,which often results in senior high school students’ writing being incomplete in structure,confusing in logic,inappropriate in detail,incorrect in grammar and vocabulary,and poor in language expression.As a result,senior high school students writing achievements are unsatisfactory.To solve these problems,this study attempts to use scaffolding theory to explore effective ways of teaching continuation task.Scaffolding theory emphasizes helping senior high school students to leap current to potential level by building appropriate scaffolds to solve problems in writing.Therefore,to solve these problems and improve the achievements of senior high school students,English teachers need to explore more effective teaching methods according to the characteristics of continuation task.The author therefore uses the relationship between the input and output hypothesis and scaffolding theory as a guide to provide scaffold for senior high school students in the pre-writing stage.In this study,108 senior high school students from two classes of grade one in H high school were studied for three months using experimental and questionnaire methods,of which senior class B was the experimental class,to complete the continuation task teaching by building structural scaffolding,language knowledge scaffolding and content scaffolding.And class A was a control class and used the traditional method of listing examples and providing topic words to continuation task teaching.This study focuses on the following two issues:1.What influence does the application of scaffolding theory in continuation task teaching have on the total score of high school students’ writing?2.What is the impact of the application of scaffolding theory in continuation task teaching on the achievement of high school students in text structure,content,and language knowledge?The experimental data showed that the scaffolding theory-based continuation task teaching was significantly better than the traditional teaching,and the overall achievements of the experimental class were significantly higher than the control class.In addition,the experimental class significantly outperformed the control class in the structure and content achievements,while there was no significant difference between the two classes in the language knowledge achievements.The study also found that after the scaffolding-based teaching on continuation task,most of senior high school students were more aware of how to write well after continuation task and were more motivated to learn.Based on the experimental results,this study makes the following suggestions that teachers are supposed to :(1)teachers should understand senior high school students’ current and potential levels of writing before teaching to prepare for building scaffolds;(2)learning scaffolds should be built and replaced according to senior high school students’ actual situations;(3)scaffolding in continuation task writing should be built in a gradual manner,and need to be taught in the order of chapter structure,content and language knowledge.