The Scaffolded Teacher Talk In English Reading Classes In Senior High School

The Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD)is a notion proposed by Vygotsky from socio-cultural perspective.Derived from the ZPD,scaffolding has been widely used in teaching.In teaching process,teachers mainly provide supports for students by speech.The speech used by teachers to offer students supports that facilitate students' comprehension,intellectual development,and higher cognitive development as well as lead to language acquisition refers to scaffolded teacher talk.Reading comprehension has been divided into four levels,namely,literal comprehension,inferential comprehension,evaluative or critical comprehension and appreciative comprehension.Each comprehension level corresponds to different kinds of reading abilities.In reading class,the predominant aim of scaffolded teacher talk is promoting students' reading comprehension.This study applies three research methods,such as classroom observation,transcribing and interview,in order to find out the distribution characteristics of scaffolded teacher talk at the four levels of reading comprehension,the factors leading to the distribution characteristics and the influences of scaffolded teacher talk on students' reading abilities.The data collected from observing,recording and transcribingillustrate that scaffolded teacher talk has its distribution characteristics at different levels of reading comprehension.The majority of scaffolded teacher talk in reading classes intends to help students to reach literal comprehension,while scaffolded teacher talk at the level of inferential comprehension is less thanthat at the former level.Moreover,the amount of scaffolded teacher talk at the level of evaluative or critical comprehension accounts for a much less part.However,scaffolded teacher doesn't appear at the level of appreciative comprehension.The interviews of the six English teachers in high school demonstrate twofactorsleading to distributions characteristics of the scaffolded teacher talk.First,reading comprehension questions in English papers of College Entrance Examination involves a great deal of questions about details of the text,which influences the distribution of scaffolded teacher talk in English reading classes in senior high school.Second,teachers' belief thatlow language proficiency is inappropriate to higher order thinking tasks has an influence on students' reading comprehension and teaching activities.What's more,the analysis result of transcription reveals that diverse strategies of scaffolding in teacher talk have been used to develop some of reading abilities,for example,teachers use clarifying to facilitates the development of the ability to understand the detailed information by the means of questioning and offering positive feedback.Based on the features of students' cognitive growth,students' the cognitive level assembles that of adults.Thus students are able to reach every level of reading comprehension with the help of teachers' guidance.In reading classes,teachers should strive to develop students' overall reading abilities in order to help students achieve the goal of reading comprehension.