A Study On The Scaffolding Construction In Interactive Discourse In Senior High English Demonstration Teaching

Classroom interactive discourse is an important bond connecting teachers and students,which plays an important role in English teaching and determines the effectiveness of teaching to a large extent.Based on the framework of sociocultural theory,output and input theory and interaction theory,and from the perspectives of scaffolding means and functions,this study analyzed the scaffolding discourse of high school English demonstration class,which was designed to answer the following three questions: 1)What's the distribution statistics of scaffolding means and functions in senior high demonstration teaching? How often is the scaffolding means respectively adopted in the demonstration teaching? 2)How do senior high English teachers scaffold students by scaffolding means? 3)How do senior high English teachers scaffold students by scaffolding functions? Specifically,15 classes were randomly selected from 30 videos of the 10 th national senior high demonstration class as the research subject with text transcription,decoding and classification.Adapted from Van de Pol's framework of scaffolding strategy analysis of teacher-student interactive discourse,the author put forward the modified framework according to the current corpus.Quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to sum up 8 means of scaffolding discourse constructed by high school English teachers(questioning,modeling,reformulating,hinting,explaining,repeating,encouraging and telling),and analyzed the differences in their distribution;combined with the relevant episodes,this paper made an in-depth analysis of the different scaffolding means and functions constructed by senior high school English teachers.In the description of the teacher-student interactive discourse process,this study found that high school teachers use different scaffolding means in the English classroom.And different scaffolding means correspond to different scaffolding functions.Specifically,when students cannot complete tasks independently,senior high school English teachers mainly adopt eight means to provide supports for students: questioning,modeling,reformulating,hinting,explaining,repeating,encouraging and telling.Questioning and hinting range the highest among scaffolding means.Secondly,the scaffolding functions provide support for students from three large levels: namely,to support students' cognitive,linguistic and affective activities.Support of students' cognitive activities: making critical feature,reduction of degrees of freedom,and demonstrate the ideal answers.Support of students' linguistic activities: it provides comprehensible input for students and creates opportunities for them to output.Support of students' affective activities: soothe students' anxiety;enhance students' motivation and enthusiasm.This study,of course,had some shortcomings and defects,due to the limitations of objective conditions,such as,lack of interview,the small sample and the narrow experimental range.But,it has achieved the expected results and has proved that the scaffolding plays a positive role in student's language development,from the cognitive and affective perspectives.It also conformed to the concept and requirement of education reform both practically and theoretically.Moreover,this study contributes significantly for further study in the area of classroom interactive discourse and scaffolding teaching.