A Comparative Study Of Novice And Expert Teacher's Scaffolding Talk In Senior High School English Teaching

Recently, teacher talk and scaffolding talk in the EFL classroom have become hot research topics. Based on the concept of Scaffolding Theory in Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory, Comprehensive Input Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis,the author conducted a comparative study of the scaffolding talks of novice and expert teachers in a senior high school English classroom,in order to answer the following three research questions: 1. What are the novice and expert teachers' understandings of scaffolding talk? 2. What are the similarities and differences in the quantities of scaffolding talks of novice and expert teachers? 3. What are the similarities and differences in the types of scaffolding talks used by novice and expert teachers?The author chose four English teachers (two novice teachers and two expert teachers) in a four-star high school in Nanjing as the participants and observed and audio-recorded their reading classes with the same teaching contents. The audio-recordings were transcribed into written documents. Then the four teachers were interviewed about their understandings of scaffolding talk, and the students involved were asked to take part in a questionnaire investigation on their teachers'use of scaffolding talk. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the audio-recording transcriptions, and the interview and questionnaire results, this study has three main findings:1. Both novice and expert teachers have a good understanding of scaffolding talk,and both recognize the importance of scaffolding talk for students' language output and can use scaffolding talk properly in real classroom teaching.2. In terms of the quantity of scaffolding talk,it is clear that expert teachers speak less but use more scaffolding talk than novice teachers.3. Expert teachers can use all of the six types of scaffolding talk (namely,bridging, clarifying, encouraging, promoting, modeling and extending) according to different situations in the classroom,while novice teachers barely use bridging and extending.Based on the above findings, some teaching implications can be proposed. As for the cognition part, both novice teachers and expert teachers should strengthen their understanding of scaffolding talk. On usage, novice teachers and expert teachers should increase the use of scaffolding talk in order to provide students with more speaking opportunities and to promote students' language output. should pay special attention to this part. On the category of scaffolding talk used by teachers, the novice teachers should make more efforts to use all the six types of scaffolding talk properly based on different interactive situations.