Scaffolding students’ English academic writing in the National college entrance examination (NCEE) : a case study in a Shenzhen senior secondary school

Abstract

In the past decades, there has been a large-scale reform of English academic writing in the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in China’s context, in which gaps could not only be found in various question types, but also the dramatic changes in the output genres. Therefore, the traditional English academic writing teaching methods and strategies are no longer able to satisfy students’ educational needs. For the sake of helping students to raise their English academic writing awareness and build in language support in producing authentic languages, this mixed-methods study aims to explore and investigate the effectiveness of the teaching materials with genre-based pedagogy and other teaching and learning strategies (i.e.: scaffolding) incorporated, as well as getting an in-depth understanding of implementation of genre-based approaches under NCEE environment. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the class in a Shenzhen Senior Secondary School. Collection of test scores and students’ worksheets, questionnaire surveys, class observations, focus group interviews with participating students and semi-structured interviews with participating English teacher were conducted to elicit: (i) teacher’s and students’ perceptions towards the intervention programme (i.e.: training sessions and using of designed teaching materials); (ii) the changes in students’ learning outcomes and (iii) the changes in teacher’s perceptions of English academic writing teaching and impacts of this designed-based programme. The major findings revealed both positive and negative perceptions of participants towards this intervention programme. The data indicated that learners had made a quite progress in English writing overall and the research conducted was rather successful. Improvements can be seen through students’ vocabulary choice, sentence integration, paragraph construction and grammar use, etc. Additionally, the teacher underscored the importance of strengthening students’ practical ability and individual learning capacity as she intended to leave more time and space for their personal development in and out of the classroom in the future English teaching career. Drawing on the findings, implications of this designed-based study were discussed and further research directions were suggested.