A Scaffolding Support System for English Essay Reading

Abstract

This research provides students a three-phased English essay reading scaffolding support system by leading them through a systematic process. By integrating Reading annotator, a web-based annotation system for reading support, the system can help students know how to enhance their reading abilities. Reading annotator helps students visual interactively to analyze basic structure of essays by identifying key elements of each paragraph such as topic sentence, controlling idea, and supporting details. Based on the key elements of each paragraph, a process-oriented structure-based scaffolding support environment is developed to help students know how to read essays with various rhetorical forms step-by-step by analyzing the essay organizations. The system applies not only text structure, visual representations, summarization, and questions reading strategies but also reading to summarize and reading to analyze reading levels. Moreover, the proposed system accommodates the scaffolding strategies such as providing procedural facilitator, guided learning, using external representational scaffolds, helping the student focus thinking on only those items that were important for the task.