A Study Of Teachers’ Scaffolding In Teacher-Student Interaction In English Classes

As learning-centered teaching philosophy gets increasing recognition,researchers and educators are attaching more importance on students’ learning process and teachers’ ways of guidance in class.Teacher-student interaction is regarded as the basic form of current English class,being both a crucial carrier and facilitator of teachers’ teaching guidance and students’ learning.However,there are many problems in teacher-student interaction in the English classroom teaching at present.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct further study on teacher-student interaction so as to improve the effectiveness of English teaching.Interaction Hypothesis and Social Constructivism give positive confirmation to teacher-student interaction’s influence on students’ learning of knowledge and improvement of problem-solving ability.It is also pointed out that teachers can effectively scaffold their students to help them construct knowledge and then achieve the learning objective,which provides theoretical guidance on how teachers should promote students’ learning.Based on the research background and the theoretical bases above,this study explores the current situation,specific process and problems of teachers’ scaffolding in teacher-student interaction in order to propose constructive suggestions for teaching.The author chooses eight classes from the Eleventh National Senior High School English Teaching Competition as research subjects.The eight excellent teachers come from different districts of China and the students come from Jimei Middle School in Xiamen.There are about 40 students participated in each class,which lasts for 35 minutes.By class observation and analysis,this thesis tends to answer the following three questions:1)What is the distribution of teachers’ scaffolding in teacher-student interaction inthe competition?2)How do the teachers promote students’ learning by scaffolding in teacher-student interaction?3)What are the problems of teachers’ scaffolding in teacher-student interaction?This thesis follows Pol’s framework for analysis of scaffolding in teacher-student interaction of the eight classes,which includes six scaffolding means and five scaffolding intentions.The author makes statistics on the scaffolding teaching episodes,analyzes the overall distribution of scaffolding means and intentions,and then discusses the specific usage of different scaffolding strategies.The results are as follows:Firstly,teachers indeed scaffold their students to help them learn in teacher-student interaction.When students are in the learning process,teachers apply scaffolding to provide assistance and guidance,with which students can understand the learning content better and reach to the learning objective.For scaffolding means,the most frequently-used ones are questioning and feeding back.Explaining and instructing follow.Modeling and hints-giving are the least-used ones.For scaffolding intentions,except that feeding back mainly serves for frustration control,all the other means hold direction maintenance as major purpose.Besides,each scaffolding means performs a special function in certain teaching situations and is considered indispensable in teacher-student interaction.In addition,it is found that there are some problems in the practical use of teachers’ scaffolding.For example,the distribution of scaffolding means is quite imbalanced;teachers do not leave enough time for students to think.Implications are provided based on the results above for teachers’ scaffolding in teacher-student interaction.Firstly,enough importance should be attached to explaining,instructing,modeling and hints-giving.Teachers are supposed to choose and use scaffolding flexibly according to the teaching content and learning condition.Secondly,teachers should realize that it is advisable for them to apply scaffolding to promote the development of students’ thinking quality.Thirdly,concerning the specific practice of scaffolding,teachers are supposed to leave enough time for students to think after questioning and try to guide them with other scaffolding means if necessary.However,despite the author’s effort throughout this study,limitations remain.The accuracy of the research results might be hampered by the limited sample size and 35-minute time of each lesson.Besides,the author chooses classes from the competition as research subjects and thus does not manage to interview the teachers and students which might produce incomprehensive results.Therefore,it is desirable that the future studies can take the problems above into consideration thus bringing bettered results.