A Study Of Teacher Mediation Within Students’ ZPDs In TCFL Classroom

Teachers were regarded as the mere knowledge-transmitters and the students the knowledge-recipients who sat in the classroom, listening to the teacher passively in the past. Mediation theory foregrounds teacher’s mediatory role in facilitating the learning process and providing mediated learning experience. Mediation theory in the Socio-cultural theory (SCT) has been a heat topic in the past decades all over the world.Much research related to mediation was carried out from different perspectives and suggested a positive role of teacher mediation in different language classrooms, like L2 English, L2 French and L2 Spanish. However, they seldom pay attention to Teaching Chinese as Foreign Language (TCFL) domain. With rapid development of economy and society in China, Chinese is gradually considered one of the most important languages nowadays. Studying mediation in L2 Chinese context is, therefore, of great importance.Prior to conducting teacher mediation,it’s important to determining learner’s ZPDs as Shayer (2002) stresses the need for teachers to know the limits of their students and teach to the limits of their ZPDs and no further. Hence, this research tries to study teacher mediation in TCFL context,centering on two major questions. First,what are features of students’ ZPDs in my TCFL class? Second,does students’ Chinese proficiency develop over time as a result of teacher mediation within ZPDs? To answer these questions,Vygotsky’s concept of Mediation Theory and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)were drawn on, three students in TCFL class in a US secondary school were selected as study subjects, teacher-student conversations were transcribed and the teacher mediational moves in oral interaction and written production were analyzed.It was found in the study that three students required different types and amount of teacher mediation in learning certain Chinese language structure. Specifically, for the same Chinese structure, three students required different mediational moves from teacher,which indicated that they had different ZPDs to command that language feature. For the same student, mediational moves were also different when it came to different Chinese structures. That is to say, different language structure located differently in that student’s ZPD. Recursion through ZPD was also perceived in the case of student Jake, indicating students’ development in Chinese language learning is not a smooth linear process, but simultaneously entails forward movement and regression. Besides, it was revealed that teacher mediation within ZPDs could promote student’s Chinese language development in oral interaction and written production alike, with students needing fewer mediational moves after teacher mediation and eventually performing well independently. Therefore the study contends that the development of a student’s Chinese language abilities requires active teacher mediation within a constructed zone of development and teacher should vary appropriate forms of mediation according to the individual student’s responsive moves in TCFL classroom.The thesis has great significance. In theory, it confirms that Vygotsky’s mediation theory and Feuerstein’s mediated learning experiences can also be applied to L2 Chinese classroom setting. The study combines Sociocultural Theory and TCFL, exploring teacher mediation and students’ ZPDs in the context of TCFL, and is therefore an important complement to the Mediation Theory. In practice, the results will be very profound in helping teacher find out more effective ways to mediate and facilitate students in TCFL classroom and provide some useful suggestions for teacher and learner in TCFL class alike. Moreover, the study devised the mediation sequence for TCFL class and put forwards that the problem that most disturbs listener’s understanding of sentence meaning should be mediated first, which gives a good example for TCFL teacher to conduct teacher mediation.