Instructional Scaffolding Strategies for Teaching Writing to Junior High School Students of a General Public School

Abstract

Learning a language is intended to help everyone to express their selves clearly and concisely utilizing the target language in oral and written composed forms. Hence, it is not enough that a student knows how to articulate their ideas orally but to communicate their thoughts and feelings expressed in writing effectively [1]. Educators exhaust strategies to assist students to achieve the learning goals particularly in writing, from their actual to their most potential capabilities, where the use of scaffolding strategies can contribute specially to developing skills in writing. This study aimed to explore the instructional scaffolding strategies employed by teachers in an urban public school and to describe the implementation of scaffolding strategy used by teachers in their writing class. The following research questions were answered through a survey form of 5-point Likert- scale and open-ended questions: 1) What instructional scaffolding strategies are mostly used by teachers in teaching writing? 2) How do teachers implement instructional scaffolding strategies in teaching writing? and 3) What are the implications of scaffolding in teaching? Twenty-four junior high school teachers from the public school voluntarily participated in the study. Data were examined using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The study revealed that the instructional scaffolding strategies used by teachers are activating student’s schema, visual aids, graphic organizer, open-ended questioning, modelling, breaking down topics into chunks, outlining, peer discussion, peer feedbacking, sentence stems, and quick writes. Also, the study described the important terms that are needed to consider in the implementation and the implication of employing this strategy in the pedagogy as a support to develop student’s writing skills.