Conversational Analysis Of Teacher’s Scaffolding Talk:

Originated from Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development, the sociocultural theory has been increasingly influential in the field of L2learning and teaching study in the past decades. Scaffolding, a metaphorical concept derived from Vygotskian conceptions of mediated learning and ZPD, has been applied extensively in teaching, denoting the process in which a student is assisted by the teacher or other more competent parties to complete a task beyond his unassisted efforts and he gradually becomes independent handling the task and demonstrates a higher level performance.Teacher’s scaffolding role is mainly achieved through speech, particularly through his talk-in-interaction with students. So teachers’scaffolding talk is defined as teacher’s language used in the process of building up scaffold and facilitating students to reach a higher cognitive level. As a systemic method-of describing naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, conversation analysis (CA) has been increasingly used in sociocultural theory based SLA studies. So the present study adopts the CA method to explore English teachers’scaffolding talk, examining its functional types, the conversation devices used and the micro-level impact on students’classroom learning.The data source of the study includes the videos of the Jiangsu provincial demonstration English lessons and other exemplary English lessons. The relevant episodes were selected and transcribed according to the CA conventions. In the analysis of data, we drew on some categories used in previous studies on the one hand, and respected the objective state and details of the conversational data on the other hand, depicting features of scaffolding talk from the data itself and tracing moment-to-moment changes of thought in teacher-student interaction.Following the sociocultural theory conceptions and using the CA method, the study has achieved the following major findings.Firstly, the functional types of scaffolding talk include:1.Clarifying:to ask for clearer and more accurate expression of ideas;2.Extending:to extend students’language use or thinking in breadth and depth;3Modeling:to demonstrate standard language use or task performance;4.Encouraging:to enhance students’ self-confidence and give positive feedback on trials;5. Prompting:to elicit or give hint to students’performance;6. Bridging: to establish a link between students’existing experience and the current learning material.Secondly, in terms of conversational devices the teachers used in scaffolding, we found that,1.Questioning, including display questions and higher proportion of referential and open questions;2. Negotiation, which inculudes paraphrasing, modifying, requesting clarification, etc.;3. Instruction, which is to inform, explain and, demonstrate to students the target items; and4. Feedback, which is validating, commenting, correcting errors.Thirdly, regarding the effect of teacher’s scaffolding talk on student classroom learning, we found that scaffolding talk not only provided students more comprehensible L2input and facilitate its take-in., but also provided more opportunities for students’ L2output and thinking extension, facilitating them to reach a higher level of self-reliance cognitive performance.