Scaffolding Instruction In Chinese As A Foreign Language: Theory And Practice

This is a study of the scaffolding instruction used in Chinese as a foreign language. The thesis consists of six chapters and ten attachments.The first chapter is the introduction. It consists of literature review, general situation of Chinese as a foreign language in the United States, and the intension and methods of this paper. It summarized the development of the theories and approaches in second language acquisition in the past century. New theory and practice can only be developed based on the old ones. Situational Language Teaching, Audiolingual Method, the Communicative Language Teaching, TPR and Natural Approach lay a deep foundation for the linguistic study of the modern days. This chapter also includes an overview of the language policy in the United States and the rapid development of Chinese Language programs in the US which give us a realistic estimation of the needs and challenges in the area of Chinese language learning.The second chapter introduces the sociocultural perspective of language and the ways practitioners in language teaching use to design a teaching model in teaching English as a second language based upon the sociocultural perspective of language. In a sociocultural perspective on human action, language is viewed as sociocultural resources for both individuals and people as a group. Language is the tool to shape the culture and culture reflectively represents the way of thinking through certain language. Language learning as one of the important human social activity happens in communicative interaction between people. Scaffolding instruction is a teaching model based on the sociocultural perspective of language. It consists of six types of scaffolding, such as modeling, schema building, text representation, bridging, contextualization and metacognition. Scaffolding works in the zone of proximal development. This instruction model represents a linguistic theory applied in a specific area. The sociocultural perspective of language is also the theoretic foundation of the research in effective teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.The third chapter discusses the characteristics of teaching Chinese. It starts with a study of student questionnaire of student background and learning strategy. The analysis of the study gives implication of Chinese language instruction. The Chinese language should be introduced as a different language rather than a difficult language. This chapter includes real classroom practice in the light of sociocultural perspective of language in teaching Chinese, in the aspects of characters, words and sentence structure as well as Chinese culture.The fourth chapter continues the development of a complete teaching method. It discusses the curriculum design, procedure, learner and teacher roles and the use of instructional materials. The way to carry out the scaffolding is to design the "tasks" which are meaningful and purposeful for the learners. In this chapter, the author shares her inventory of tasks that are designed for the Chinese as foreign language class.The fifth chapter includes four lesson plans using the scaffolding model. There is background information of the lessons planning, such as student, time frame, material selection etc. Each lesson focuses on different age group and proficiency level. These real cases demonstrate the sociocultural perspective embedded in the planning of Chinese lessons. Also there is the analysis of the implementation of the lessons.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of the study. It summarizes the contents and stresses the importance of research on the pedagogy of Chinese as a foreign/second language. As the conclusion, the scaffolding instruction in Chinese as foreign language is an innovative approach; it needs a lot of promotion, experiment in the field. It also requires certain material support. The scaffolding instruction in Chinese as foreign language should be used in a larger scale to test its effectiveness.