A Study Of The Scaffolding Functions Of Meaning Negotiation In Chinese Senior High School English Classroom

In the early 1980's, many scholars paid close attention to the negotiation of meaing. The concept of negotiation of meaning is from Long's modified interaction theory, and Long also divides the negotiation of meaning into six types. Later,scholars put forward different definitions on negotiation of meaning. Varonis and Gass have also proposed a model which can explain the process of negotiation of meaning, namely, "T-I-R-RR" model.In the learning process of students,teachers help students to understand the meaning of new knowledge through discoursal negotiation of meaning.For learners,discoursal negotiation of meaning in Chinese senior high school English classroom plays a key role in building a bridge between old and new knowledge learning which focuses on the scaffolding role of teachers in learning process. Based on Vygosky's ZPD theory, Wood, Bruner and Ross suggested that teachers teaching mainly through the realization of six "scaffolding function" to help students complete the meaning of construction.On the basis of Long's and Varonis & Gass's model of negotiation of meaning and Long's six types of negotiation of meaning. This paper tries to explore the scaffolding function of negotiation of meaning by recording and observing the real situations of high school English classroom teaching. This paper in order to provide a reference to enrich the application study of scaffolding to negotiation of meaning. Though study, the paper mainly finds that:(i) In high school English classroom, the proportion of each type of negotiation of meaning is different, including all the six types, the negotiation ways of eliciting, questioning,evaluating,correcting and presenting will also be used during the period,showing a phenomena of diversification. This study finds that the proportion of other-repetition(36.00%),comprehension checks(66.67%), expansion(44.44%) and self-repetition(36.00%)was high,which is different from the study by Li Ye and Zhao Dongmei in 2016. But the proportion of clarification requests(11.11%) is lowest,which is consistent with the results of Li Hang in 2011, indicating that the students' chances of using language are still not enough.(ii) In the process of negotiation, teachers often use the six types of negotiation to achieve six kinds of scaffolding function including recruitment, direction maintenance and other functions, to help students build emotional scaffolding, cognitive scaffolding and language scaffolding. It means that the scaffolding function of meaning negotiation will help teachers to build scaffolding for students, elicit students to learn and understand new knowledge, which has reduced cramming education greatly. But the author still finds that in the process of negotiation,students generally only use a few words (yes / true / serious) to answer the question, rarely use sentences to express their point of view, thus, teachers should give students more opportunities to express themselves,and initiate more discourse turns.(ii)Discoursal negotiation of meaning will increase the opportunity of teachers' feedback,for example,teachers always use some words,such as "first aid is a temporary form of what"to push students to pay attention to the language output defects, and then push them constantly to adjust their output. Teachers also use feedback words such as "congratulation/right/yes/of course" to build the emotial scaffolding. So in a certain sense, it can enhance the positive effect of learners' language output.