A Probe Into The Peer Scaffoldings In Pair Work In Junior Middle School English Classrooms

This study adopts a quantitative and qualitative mixed design to explore the current situation of peer scaffolding in paired group interactions in ESL classrooms in Beijing from a sociocultural perspective.It investigates the inherent relationships between the application of peer scaffolding in paired interactions and students' oral English performance,and examines the different characteristics of peer scaffolding in the pair work among students of different English proficiency levels and of different grouping types.The participants elicited in this research are 58 eighth-graders from two intact classes in an ordinary junior middle school in Beijing.The results tentatively show that:(1)Peer scaffoldings do commonly exist among peer group interactions in junior middle school English classes;(2)Peer scaffolding is found to have the function of "optimizing expressions",in addition to the seven major functions discovered and confirmed in former studies;(3)The effects of peer scaffolding in two-person group interactions on high-proficiency learners is noticeably different from that on low-proficiency learners,in terms of the great distinction in the number(frequency of occurrence)of types/functions of peer scaffolding;(4)Peer scaffolding can exert great influences on the performance of ESL learners' oral English performance,especially on those low-proficiency ESL learners with the help of their higher-proficiency partners;(5)Only when the ESL learners reach a certain high enough proficiency level will they be able to provide scaffoldings.Different grouping types among such students play different roles in the efficacy of peer scaffolding in two-person group interactions and exert great influences on their individual oral performance for discussion.And it is found that "high-low achievers"combination is the optimal grouping type for producing and exploiting peer scaffoldings to the utmost,followed by "high-high achievers" and "low-low achievers" grouping types,with the "low-low achievers" grouping type being the least desirable for making the best of the efficacy of peer scaffolding in two-person group interactions;(6)Due to the limitation of ESL learners' second language proficiency,they sometimes provide wrong or misleading scaffolding,possibly making negative impacts on their peer.The findings indicate that generally speaking peer scaffolding indeed facilitates the development of ESL learners' ZPD and the betterment of ESL learners' second language proficiency in terms of their oral English.