สมพร ศรีรัตนากูล. The Effects of Using Scaffolded Guidance on Students' Writing. Master's Degree(Applied Linguistics (English for Science and Technology)). King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. : King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, 1997.
The Effects of Using Scaffolded Guidance on Students' Writing
Abstract:
The purpose of this classroom-based research study is to find out the effects
of using scaffolded guidance on students' writing and specifically whether scaffolded
guidance can help students to write freely and effectively. Scaffolded guidance is an
approach which aims to help learners working independently by giving full teacher's
support at the beginning of the tasks and gradually reducing the support. When there
is no support, the learners can complete the task independently.
The experiment was carried out with 44 Mattayomsuksa 5 students of Islamic
College of Thailand. The pre-post tasks which were the main instruments. 20
students' work was collected. For the other research instruments, namely,
experimental tasks, additional homework exercises, observation checksheets and
semi-structured interviews, only nine subjects were selected to be a representative
sample ofthe whole class.
In order to investigate whether scaffolded guidance could help students in
writing, the researcher provided four tasks, namely, Parallel Writing, Guided
Composition, Questions and Answers and Free Writing. The tasks started from the
simplest towards the more complex, \\'ith the guidance and support full at the
beginning and gradually decreasing.
The findings of this research study revealed that scaffolded guidance could
improve students' writing holistically. For the analytic effects, it was found that
scaffolded guidance worked very well for the lower-level cognitive skills, namely,
punctuation and spelling, while the higher-level cognitive skills, namely, organization,
grammar and content showed less improvement. Moreover, scaffolded guidance
motivated students and helped them to become independent learners.