A Comparative Study On Scaffolding Functions Of Online Classroom Feedback Between Novice And Expert High School English Teachers

Teachers’ classroom feedback is an important part of teachers’ discourse and serves as a bridge for teachers and students to communicate in classroom interactions,providing a scaffolding role for students’ learning.Based on scaffolding theory,interaction hypothesis theory and input and output hypothesis theory,this study conducts a comparative study on the scaffolding function of novice and expert high school English teachers’ online classroom feedback to explore two research questions: 1.How about the scaffolding situation of classroom feedback between novice and expert high school English teachers? 2.Are there any difference between novice and expert high school English language teacher classroom feedback functions? If so,what are they?In this study,three novice and three expert English teachers from a high school in Inner Mongolia were selected and observation and survey methods were adopted.Each teacher’s online classroom was observed to understand the construction of their classroom feedback language scaffolding and six teachers were interviewed to explore the differences in their classroom feedback language scaffolding functions.The main findings of the study were:First,both groups of teachers built three different types of classroom feedback for their students;with the most affective scaffolding and the least cognitive scaffolding.However,the number of feedback scaffolds built by novice teachers was lower than that of expert teachers.Secondly,there were differences in the functions of classroom feedback scaffolding between novice and expert high school English teachers: novice teachers did not achieve as many functions as expert teachers by scaffolding classroom feedback.Specifically,novice teachers used feedback to build cognitive scaffolds to reduce the difficulty of the task,to build affective scaffolds to stimulate students’ interest in learning and reduce their anxiety in class,and to build linguistic scaffolds to provide students with rich comprehensible input and to help them revise themselves.In contrast,the expert teachers not only fulfilled the functions that the novice teachers had achieved,but also used the scaffolding of feedback to fulfil additional functions: they used the cognitive scaffolding of feedback to provide teaching strategies and teacher demonstration;they used the affective scaffolding to develop students’ self-confidence;and they used the linguistic scaffolding to create opportunities to facilitate students’ language output.In addition,novice teachers still have shortcomings in the functions achieved by these three kinds of scaffolds.In response to these problems,the author makes the following suggestions: novice teachers should learn more from expert teachers and pay attention to the scaffolding of feedback from them;they should focus on students,grasp their “nearest development area” and reasonably build cognitive scaffolding;they should pay attention to students’ emotional changes and use various forms of feedback to build affective scaffolding in a timely manner.In addition,teachers should pay attention to the timely withdrawal of linguistic scaffolding.