The Roles Of The Learner And The Teacher In Constructing Scaffolding In Senior High School English Teaching

Scaffolding was defined as"a process that enables a child or a novice to solve a problem, carry out a task, or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts". Scaffolding has drawn great attention among linguists. Apart from its great theoretical value in linguistic study, scaffolding is highly valued in many disciplines.Most teaching is still organized along traditional lines. Especially in China, a lot of English classrooms are still teacher-centered. The learners passively accept what the teacher tells instead of thinking actively or exploring the new knowledge and the teachers are the instructors of the language. Researchers and practitioners typically focus on the actions of the more knowledgeable other,such as, adults, more experienced peers, computers and other kinds of teaching materials in scaffolding whereas this study aims at the critical role learner plays in successful scaffolding and how teacher and learner construct successful scaffolding.The participants in the test were 45 senior grade one students from Minxian No.1 high school. The author devised a task that required them to tell a 2-3 minutes personal narrative about an embarrassing, exciting, sad, or funny event that had happened to them. The students first told their stories to the teacher. Following the teacher's scaffolding, students moved to a different classroom to tell the same story to the class. Between the two tellings, the teacher and the storyteller engaged in scaffolding, lasting 4-5 minutes. All story tellings as well as the scaffolding sessions were audiotaped and later transcribed. After finishing the task students were asked to do an interview to discuss the reasons why some students made progress after scaffolding, but others not.The results show that the teacher-initiated interactional scaffolding has no significant effect on students'story quality by comparing the scores of the first telling and retelling. After analyzing the results of the discourse and the interview, it shows that if both the learner and the teacher take part in the scaffolding actively, then they can construct more effective scaffolding. The teacher is an important factor in the process of successful scaffolding construction, but learners play an even more significant role in it. Without the competence or willingness to engage with the more knowledgeable other or a readiness to incorporate and appropriate what has been revealed in interaction with the teacher, the learner can not make progress at least not immediately. This paper also exemplifies five criteria necessary for a more effective scaffolding session: (1) Learners must have willingness of constructing the scaffolding with the teacher and changing the version of the story. (2) Learners must have the competence of understanding teachers'scaffolding. (3) Learners must have the competence of changing the version of the story. (4) The teacher must put great efforts to construct scaffolding. (5) The task must have enough potentially interesting elements and suitable difficulty for the students to make improvement.The following are the implications concluded for how to construct successful scaffolding in senior high school English teaching: (1) Classroom instruction must be learner-centered. (2) Teachers should play their guiding role. The teachers should be good at controlling learners'affective factors and developing learners'competence, and they should determine learners'zone of proximal development through collaboration beforehand and arrange the task carefully to construct scaffolding successfully. (3) The teaching process is an interaction of the teacher and the learners. Learners and teachers should learn, research and cooperate together to construct"learning community".This paper also points out the limitations existing in the present study and makes suggestions for further research.