A Study Of Peer Scaffolding In Group Interaction Of Junior Middle School English Classes

In the context of China’s exam-oriented education,English teaching in middle school focuses on teacher’s speaking and students’ listening and stresses input of English language knowledge and accumulation,but ignores the students’ autonomic learning and emotional communication between teachers and students.These situations cause less effective interaction and boring learning atmosphere.Therefore,many researchers and teachers have been exploring more effective methods of teaching English.In recent years,group interaction has been widely concerned.Many studies have shown that group interaction contributes to learners’ language development.Peer scaffolding in the group interaction plays a vital role in the language development of learners.However,the research on peer scaffolding has not attracted much attention from the domestic research,especially peer scaffolding in junior middle school English classroom.Therefore,the present research is committed to investigating the current situation of peer scaffolding in junior middle school English classroom,analyzing the categories of peer scaffolding and influence factors of peer scaffolding,and hoping to provide valuable references for junior middle school English teaching and promote learners’ language development.Based on the theory of Social Constructivism and Zone of Proximal Development,this study takes quantitative research and qualitative research as the research method to investigate 96 students from 2 classes of grade three in junior middle school.Each class was divided into 8 groups with 6 students in each group.This study aims to explore peer scaffolding in group interaction mainly through interactive dialogue recording,questionnaire and after-class interview.Based on interactive recording,the questionnaire data and interview,the research results show that:(1)Peer scaffolding from group interaction exists in junior middle school English classroom,and it is common to provide peer scaffolding among students.(2)The role of peer support is reflected in two aspects: language development and emotional support.Language development includes inviting participation,providing words,providing opinions,correcting false expressions,simplifying tasks and direction maintenance.Emotional support includes only one aspect: frustration control.However,the scaffolding provided by peers has some limitations,because learners are still in the rising stage of language development and lack of language control.(3)The factors that influence peer scaffolding include external factors and internal factors.External factors include topic selection and team members’ cooperation.Internal factors consist of language proficiency,personality,interaction strategy,self-esteem and risk taking ability.Generally speaking,peer scaffolding helps to promote the effectiveness of group interaction in junior middle school and learner’ language development and cognitive ability.The results of the present study can provide some enlightenment to English teaching in junior middle school to some extent.Nevertheless,there are still a lot of shortcomings in this study because of the small number of research objects and short research time.