An Empirical Study On The Coordinate Influence Of English Teachers’ Co-Speech Gestures And Scaffolding Talk On Scaffolding Effect In Junior High School

Teacher talk has long been a hot topic of foreign language teaching and research.In recent years,teachers’scaffolding talk,which refers to teachers’verbal assistance provided when students have problems in accomplishing a learning task independently,has received increasing attention.But gestures and discourse are inseparable in meaning and function,which play a crucial role in information transmission.However,few scholars have studied the combination of gesture and teachers’scaffolding talk.Therefore,based on scaffolding theory and multi-modal theory,the thesis analyzes the scaffolding talk and co-speech gestures in junior high school and is intended to answer the following four questions:1.In the scaffolding conversations in teaching,what co-speech gestures and scaffolding means are used by teachers in class?2.In the scaffolding conversations in teaching,what co-speech gestures and scaffolding means are used by teachers in class?3.What are the reasons for the failure of scaffolding conversations?4.What are the synergistic effects of co-speech gestures and scaffolding talk through scaffolding conversations?In this research,32 teaching videos of the 13^thNational English High-Quality Courses in Junior High School are the materials of analyzing.ELAN,a multi-modal labeling software,is used to encode classroom teaching videos and conduct statistical data by video analysis method.Part of the scaffold conversations are transcribed by text,and relevant analysis is carried out using the obtained data.After the analyzing,the results are as follows:1.There are nine kinds of scaffolding talk and five kinds of co-speech gestures the teachers use in total.The scaffolding means are questioning,hinting,reformulating,telling,explaining,encouraging,repeating,modeling,and waiting as well;the co-speech gestures include deictic gesture,symbolic gesture,pragmatic gesture and operational gesture.The questioning and deictic gesture are used the most in their respective category,while waiting and operational gesture rank the least.2.There are 186 scaffolding conversations in total,including 138 successful scaffolding conversations and 48 failed scaffolding conversations,in which the success rate is 74%.Furthermore,the success rate of scaffolding conversations achieved only by scaffolding talk is lower than that of scaffolding conversations achieved by both,in which the former one is 66%while the latter is 88%.It can be seen that when teachers use two modalities to help students,students’problems are easier to be solved.3.In terms of the reasons for the failure of scaffolding conversations,there are three main reasons from the perspective of the teachers.The first one is the lack of teachers’guidance.Besides,teachers’lack of co-speech gestures using is another reason.Admittedly,some scaffolding conversations fail because of teachers’unclear expressions of language,which cause the difficulties for students to understand4.In terms of the synergistic effects of scaffolding talk and co-speech gestures,there are four main effects:1)develop students’language competence from the lexical level and sentence level,which promotes the vocabulary acquisition and the mastery of sentence patterns of students;2)develop students’learning strategy,thus improving learning efficiency and develop autonomous learning ability;3)develop students’thinking quality,activating students’thinking and promoting their development in logical thinking,critical thinking and creative thinking;4)develop students’affect,lessening students’frustration and anxiety and helping to build their confidence.Based on the results,for the better performance of teachers’scaffolding talk and co-speech gestures,the author puts forward some suggestions for English teachers in junior high school.First,raising the awareness of applying teachers’scaffolding talk with co-speech gestures together.Second,using more scaffolding means and co-speech gestures in a scaffolding conversation.Third,teachers should give students more guidance.Last,providing students with clear expressions of language.