There is research evidence
for the claim that appropriate scaffolds in the classroom, specifically
pictures, can effectively boost the students’ performance in writing in terms of
their ability to elaborate the ideas. The present study concerns the use of
pictures in relation to scaffolding thirty sixth grade students (in Aleppo,
Syria) in writing descriptions of people and place. This study aims to figure
out how pictures scaffold the students in descriptive writing and whether or
not pictures are adequate to scaffold the students. For this purpose, some
tasks of descriptive writing were designed with pictures to aid descriptions of
people and places. The data gathered from the students’ responses were analysed
based on three criteria; number of word, completion of the tasks, additional
information. Further, the responses were analysed at there levels; word,
sentence, and paragraph. The study has found that in describing people,
pictures are not effective in supporting children. This could be seen from the limited
number of words the students wrote and the limited additional information that
they provided in their responses. On the contrary, pictures effectively
scaffolded the students in writing descriptions of places. This was evident from
the students’ ability to elaborate and expand ideas through the use of
prepositions at the level of sentence as well as paragraph. The implication of this is that teachers could incorporate scaffolding
through the visual input i.e pictures to enhance the descriptive writing skills
of their students.