EFL Teacher Expertise In Whole-class Scaffolding ——A Multiple-case Study In Shanghai Primary Schools

Expertise refers to the skills,knowledge,ideas or superior performances possessed by an expert in a specific domain.It follows that teacher expertise includes the expert teaching skills,expert teaching performances,and expert teacher cognition such as knowledge,beliefs,and pedagogical reasoning.So far,a large quantity of research has accumulated rich knowledge about teacher expertise from the cognitive-psychological perspective,where teacher expertise has been defined in terms of the quantity of knowledge and the quality of the its organization,the efficiency of performances and insight in teaching through describing expert teachers' cognition and superior performances.However,teacher expertise from this perspective seems to be defined disconnecting from learning in that the related studies tend to take teachers as independent individuals with complex cognition but ignore their roles as external mediators and assistance providers for learning from the sociocultural view of teaching and learning.Drawing on the sociocultural perspective to study teacher expertise is expected to better characterize it in terms of an integration of the learning and teaching processes by examining the roles that expert teachers play and the scaffolding strategies they utilize to support the development of children's learning in teaching.However,only several studies were conducted to generate limited understanding about teacher expertise from this perspective,and no related research has been conducted in the ESL/EFL teaching field yet.The present research represents a tentative exploration of primary school EFL teacher expertise in whole-class scaffolding from the macro-level(i.e.,the selection and sequencing of pedagogical activities)and the micro-level(i.e.the interactional patterns and the interactional scaffolding strategies)to explore the nature of teacher expertise from the sociocultural perspective so as to enrich the fairly scant studies from this angle,which will eventually enhance our understanding of EFL teacher expertise within the scope of teaching as assistance and shed some light on the ESL/EFL classroom teaching and teacher education.Methodologically,the research adopted a qualitative research method with multiple cases.It involved 24 participants from eleven primary schools in Shanghai,including two expert teachers,twenty experienced non-expert ones,and two novices.The data of each participant was collected through in-depth interviews,classroom observations,stimulated recalls,and collection of artifacts.The data was analyzed inductively and deductively,and then quantified to make comparisons among the three groups of teachers.The comparisons reveal that expert teachers had the following characteristics in whole-class scaffolding.At the macro-level of scaffolding,the primary school EFL expert teachers used open,semi-open and closed activities in a relatively balanced manner in their classrooms but with an inclination to the former two;they ended their language teaching with supported open activities [Open(SO)];At the micro-level:they interacted with the students most frequently in the collaborative interactional pattern;they provided less explicit interactional scaffolding more frequently and utilized a scaffolding structure with gradual increase of explicitness of scaffolding or in-time withdrawal of it to assist the students during interaction.Several mechanisms,by which the expert teachers scaffolded EFL learning in their classrooms,have been found through the detailed qualitative analysis.Firstly,expert EFL teachers tended to scaffold the learner's language learning processes by teaching based on diagnosis,utilizing their prior knowledge and experiences as scaffolding for learning and handing over the regulation of independence in the semi-open and open activities.Secondly,they were effective in transferring the regulation of the target language forms by gradually taking back the content support through adjusting the mediational texts and the semiotic systems while retaining the language support of the target language forms,hence to engage learners in meaningful repetition of the structures.Thirdly,the expert EFL teachers offered affective and social support by engaging the students in active participation and language use through a collaborative interactional pattern,which was conductive to language development.Finally,they were responsive to the learners' needs and skillful at providing interactional scaffolding contingently and gradually.The research,based on the results and discussion,proposes seven hypotheses to tentatively theorize the EFL teacher expertise in whole-class scaffolding:Hypothesis 1 Expert teachers tend to have strong awareness and willingness to maximize learners' participation by organizing pedagogical activities with more openness.Hypothesis 2 Expert teachers tend to be good at teaching the language based on the diagnosis of students' learning,and adapting teaching to it.Hypothesis 3 Expert teachers tend to transfer the regulation of the language consciously and help the students to achieve self-regulation within their ZPDs by adjusting the scaffolding elements in pedagogical activities.Hypothesis 4 Expert teachers tend to engage the students in meaningful repetition to accumulate the handover of the target language forms through semi-open and open activities.Hypothesis 5 Expert teachers tend to assist the students with their development of the target language forms through skillful balancing of language as objective and language as communication tool in the EFL classroom.Hypothesis 6 Expert teachers tend to be good at interacting with the students in a collaborative pattern,establishing an equal and mutually engaged teacher-students relationship in the EFL classroom.Hypothesis 7 Expert teachers tend to be responsive to the emergent students' needs in whole-class instruction and skillful at providing the interactional scaffolding contingently.The research is theoretically,methodologically and practically significant.It has theoretically bridged a gap in the field of EFL teacher expertise from a sociocultural perspective with seven hypotheses to conceptualize EFL teacher expertise in whole-class scaffolding.It is methodologically innovative to study teacher expertise with focused tasks done in naturalistic teaching context.Practically,the findings and the tentative theory about EFL teacher expertise in the research are expected to offer framework for EFL teacher training programs and benchmarks to design and assess teaching in EFL classrooms.