Investigating teachers' perceptions on the use of scaffolding strategies to enhance EFL learners' composition writing.The case of third year learners at Boussaid Kamel Eddine/ Agdouch Diab middle

Abstract

The current research attempts to recognize the teachers’ perceptions on their use of different scaffolding strategies in the classroom during written sessions. The aim behind conducting this study is to investigate the role of teachers’ scaffolding strategies to enhance EFL learners ' composition writing skill. This study is based on perceptions about the scaffolding strategies. It is conducted at Boussaid Kamel Eddine Middle School with third year English Students. In order to answer the research questions, two data collection tools are used: a classroom observation that included both the students as well as the teacher, and interviews to teachers of the writing module that provided deep information about the scaffolding strategies used to develop students' writing abilities in which a qualitative descriptive design is adopted. As far as data analysis is concerned, descriptive analysis is employed to analyze the qualitative data collected from classroom observation, and for the interview a Quantitative Content Analysis is used. An observation Grid is elaborated to help researchers observe and note down what they have observed. The results of the study have shown that the teachers implement different scaffolding strategies in the writing module, particularly: ʻ Bridging, Modeling, Text representation, Contextualization, Schema building and Developing meta-cognition ʼ, affirming that these strategies help students overcome their writing problems, develop their language proficiency, build their confidence, develop their meta-cognitive skills, and become more effective communicators as well.