A Case Study Of The Application Of Teacher Scaffolding To English Reading-for-Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Reading-for-writing teaching is considered as a common and effective way to teach English writing in senior high school,and it helps to improve students’ thinking and writing skills.In reading-for-writing teaching,reading is the input and writing is the output.Input and output are two inseparable and important links in language acquisition.Therefore,closely linking language input and language output can provide students with the opportunity to imitate and use the language they have learned.At present,the teaching concept of integrating reading and writing is increasingly approved by senior high school English teachers.However,there exists some problems in the actual reading-for-writing teaching.For example,although there are reading and writing activities in classroom teaching,the logical relationship between the activities is weak,and teachers generally do not provide sufficient supports for students’ writing,resulting in difficulties for students to complete writing tasks.In view of this,through classroom observation,questionnaire and interview,this research focuses on two English teachers(teacher A and teacher B)and their students from H High School as case studies,and attempts to survey the types of scaffolding senior high English teachers provide for students in reading-for-writing teaching,the effectiveness of the scaffolding provided by teachers,and the principal difficulties teachers may encounter in providing scaffolding for students in reading-for-writing teaching.Therefore,this study intends to explore the following three research questions:(1)What scaffolding do teachers provide for students in high school English reading-for-writing teaching?(2)What’s the effect of the implementation of teacher scaffolding?(3)What difficulties do teachers have in providing scaffolding for students in reading-for-writing teaching?The results of this research are as follows:(1)Teacher A is able to provide content,language,and structural scaffolding for students in reading-for-writing teaching.Teacher B is able to provide content,language,structure,thinking,and assessment scaffolding for students in reading-for-writing teaching,and help students complete their writing tasks more effectively.(2)Students in both teachers’ classes think that teachers’ scaffolding is effective on the whole.They consider content,language and structure scaffolding as the most effective,assessment scaffolding as the least effective.(3)Both of the teachers find it difficult to interpret the text in depth,offer sufficient assessment scaffolding,find the connection between reading and writing activities,and motivate students’ interest in reading-for-writing lesson.Based on the above research results,the author puts forward relevant suggestions on the application of teacher scaffolding in reading-for-writing teaching,with a view to providing reference for English teachers to create more effective reading-for-writing teaching.First,teachers need to interpret the text in depth from the perspective of genre,content,and the author’s intention.Second,teachers need to provide more assessment scaffolding for students to realize assessment for teaching and learning.Third,teachers need to design question chains around the theme to help students sort out the information in the reading text.Fourth,teachers need to build thematic connections between reading and writing.