An Investigation Of Peer Scaffolding Talk In Group Interaction In Senior English Class

Nowadays the contents of the latest standards in English for learning English is more focused on the cultivation of the ability to apply and develop.So we need that our English teachers should consciously have a purpose and a planned way to cultivate the students' oral English communication skills in the English class.Then for second language acquisition researchers,how to help students improve their application ability of communication becomes a hot research point.Peer scaffolding talk is a good kind of verbal help for students when they cannot complete a task independently.Richard,J.et al.(1992)in Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics stated that scaffolding is the building up a target language structure over several turns in an interaction.That is say,in the interaction between peers,the students use special talk to make each other comprehend the manageable component parts.The special talk is the scaffolding talk.So this study is trying to find out how to use peer scaffolding talk to help high school students to carry on the interaction task of English well.This study chooses one high teacher and his eighteen students as subjects.Recording is the main research instrument,and questionnaire and interview are also used as auxiliary instrument in this research.The recordings are transcribed.This study is trying to answer the following questions: 1.What kinds of peer scaffolding talk does senior students use? 2.What kinds of peer scaffolding talk does senior students use most frequently? 3.What kinds of peer scaffolding talk do senior students like most? 4.If there are differences between the frequencies of peer's use and senior students' favor of peer scaffolding talk,what are the reasons ?The analysis for the research question one and two are based on the recording of interaction tasks.After concluding the kinds of peer scaffolding talk that the senior student uses in class,the amounts of each kind is calculated.The analysis of question three is based on the questionnaire for students.Through students' prefer to each kind,the top three kinds of peer scaffolding talks are confirmed.The analysis of question four is based on the interview for both senior students and teachers.The first interview is for senior students and then is for teacher.Through the results of the study,the major findings are: firstly,all the peer scaffolding talk that senior students use in interaction task are modeling,bridging,contextualizing,schema building,re-presenting,developing meta-cognition,extending,encouraging and inserting.Secondly,the top three frequent kinds of peer scaffolding talk that senior students use are encouraging,re-presenting and extending.Thirdly,the top three welcome kinds of peer scaffolding talk among senior students in interaction tasks are modeling,encouraging and developing meta-cognition.So from the second and third findings,there are differences between the frequencies of peer's use and students' favor of peer scaffolding talk.Encouraging is the only peer scaffolding talk that both the peer often uses and students like most.It is clear that to encourage senior students in interaction task is very important.The peer often uses re-presenting but students do not like it because students often ignore peer's repetition in class.Students think peer just repeats what they have said but they ignore that the peer sometimes repeats with corrected sentences.The peer also often uses extending,but some students feel too nervous to that kind of peer scaffolding talk.Only when they are interested in the talking topic would they like the peer can ask more.Senior students like modeling and developing meta-cognition very much.But for the peer,she or he only uses example when students seem puzzled after she or he gives directions.Besides,because of the objective limitations,there are also some shortages in this study,such as the quantity of subjects that this study just chooses one class from the high school.But through some related investigation of this study,we still find out some research results,such as the interactive tasks in the process of English in high school now,students will actively use peer scaffolding talk to help the students to complete English interactive tasks.So it can make the English class more rich and vivid.But So the author suggest a further study about peer scaffolding talk in high school that can be more special.