An Analysis Of Teacher Talk In Senior Middle School English Classroom

This paper presents a preliminary study on scaffolding in its connection to the Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in the environment of five senior middle school English classrooms. Scaffolding is the support provided to learners to enable them to perform tasks which are beyond their capacity. Scaffolding is increasingly popular among educators, researchers and practitioners. It provides us an easy way to grasp justification of teacher intervention in learning. Depending on the context of the use of scaffolding, it may facilitate or hind student learning. In other words, the teachers may provide or fail to provide scaffolding for student learning in their IRF (student initiation, teacher response, and student follow-up) patterns.Since teachers always use their talk to offer students scaffolding, teacher talk plays a significant role in learning. According to Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), education is a "co-construction of knowledge" whereby more knowledgeable participants help those less knowledgeable to understand the activity by providing them with scaffolding, and involving them into the activity as much as possible. With the help and guidance, learners can deal with those parts that they cannot manage on their own. The quality of the dialogue between teachers and students is the key factor that determines whether the co-construction can be successfully carried out or not. In this paper, the researcher analyzes the interactive exchanges between teachers and students in senior middle school English classrooms by adopting this socio-constructivist position, with the aims to reveal some typical features of successful scaffolding and demonstrate how language is used to serve the function of scaffolding. At last, the thesis summarizes some approaches to providing students with successful scaffolding.Through the analysis, the researcher proposes that a successful scaffolder should determine students' zone of proximal development through collaboration between the teacher and students beforehand. Then, the teacher can support students at the cutting edge of their competencies by providing minimal support, constantly adjusting the amount of scaffolding, keeping the task at a proper level of difficulty, avoiding unnecessary frustration, and encouraging students' independent learning. The researcher also finds out that a good teacher should involve students more in meaning negotiations and interactions by constantly reformulating elicitation, seeking clarification, checking for confirmation, providing explicitly acknowledgement, encouraging student contributions, asking questions for further understanding, presenting certain tools to help students deliver longer responses, showing agreement and appreciation with eye contacts or body postures and even using diminutives and nicknames to construct an amiable relationship with students. A good scaffolder also has the attribute of tolerating learners' silence and smoothly tuning up the disorder among them, giving them enough time to think and formulate their responses, and he would empower students to deliver their own idea independently and create a democratic atmosphere, allowing students take initiative without the feeling of suppression. The teacher would also avoid tight control structures of the exchange and abandon impoverished evaluation or confirmation by leaving time and space for students to formulate their own understanding, giving more open questions, attaching importance to the form of dialogues to activate students, and asking additional questions as a takeoff for students' further understanding. Then, the typical three part-exchange structure of teacher-student interaction, namely, teacher initiation, student response, teacher feedback or evaluation (IRE or IRF), would be transformed into student-initiated IRF structure (student initiation, teacher response, and student follow-up). These findings provide teachers with some useful pedagogical implications.