| dc.description.abstract | Writing is an essential skill for junior high school students, but how to teach the students writing is still has room to improve. In this study, a pre-class hierarchy map approach was used as a scaffolding tool to support junior high school students’ writing exercises. To study the advantages of the pre-class hierarchy map approach, a quasi-experimental design was adopted. Fifty-two junior high school students were involved in this study. Among them, twenty-four were divided into experimental groups, and another twenty-eight were divided into control groups. The experimental groups used the hierarchy map approach as their writing affordance, and the control groups were treated with a traditional guided writing approach. An online platform that supported the hierarchy map approach named CoCoing.info (https://www.cocoing.info) was adopted. All the students’ writing outcomes were measured by two reviewers through the four writing aspects including ‘intentional selection,’ ‘structural organization,’ ‘sentence formation,’ and ‘punctuation, formatting, and typos.’ The results of this study reveal:
1. Using the pre-class hierarchy map can improve the students’ ‘intentional selection,’ ‘structural organization,’ ‘sent words and sentences,’ and ‘typos, format, and punctuation.’writing performance.
2. There is no significant difference in terms of the number of words between the experimental groups and control groups.
3. The total score of the pre-class hierarchy map is moderately positively related to the ‘total score’ of writing, and moderately related to ‘intentional selection,’ ‘structural organization,’ and ‘typos, format, and punctuation.’
4. The students have a positive attitude towards the pre-class hierarchy map.
Key word：Pre-Class Hierarchy Map, Writing Instruction, Writing Scaffold. | en_US |