On the importance of A socio-culturally designed teaching model in an EFL writing classroom

Abstract

Writing is a means of articulating ideas, arousing feelings, persuading and convincing other people, but the procedure of writing has become arduous and labyrinthine for Iranian EFL learners. The educational system in Iran is structure-based and it ignores the communicative role of writing, so students' performance in writing wouldn’t be desirable. To tackle the mentioned problem, the present paper develops a scaffolding environment to maximize students writing dexterities through the application of various scaffolding means coined by Tharp and Gallimore (1988) during the stages of Seow's process model. The purpose was to determine the procedure of teacher guidance in a process- oriented situation and trace the scaffolding means which had a pre-eminent role in enhancing students' writing proficiency by observing the class and conducting an interview. To this end, 15 female students within the age range of 15-18 studying in Be’sat Language Institute in Salmas, Iran participated in this study. The results elucidated that students could benefit from the established situation in different ways during the accomplishment of their writing tasks. At the end, the study provided some pedagogical implications for teachers in terms of teaching writing.