Scaffolded instruction and interaction in an ESL classroom

This research study uses socio-cultural theories of learning to investigate scaffolded instruction as a pedagogical tool across instructional activities and describe the type of student interaction it creates in the particular context of one ESL classroom in need of ways for improving interaction among students. The three main objectives of the study include an attempt to describe how scaffolding is discursively performed in the two instructional activities of teacher-led whole group lessons and tutorials a description of student interaction in the classroom when scaffolding is applied and an investigation of how scaffolding as dialogic interaction contrasts between the two instructional activities. Participants in this study were all secondary school students attending a remedial English class consisting of no more than ten students at an American international school in Kuwait. Audio recording of the lesson for spoken discourse analysis, alongside observation and interviewing were used to collect data simultaneously for the two instructional activities of teacher-led whole group lessons and tutorials which were both formatted, based on previous literature to include scaffolding elements. For both whole group lessons and tutorials, observations took place as well as a recording and transcription of the lesson for oral discourse analysis followed by interviews with students immediately after the lesson. This was repeated for three whole group teacher-led lessons and three tutorials resulting in a total of 6 data collection events for each of the three research methods were completed. By providing a linguistic understanding of scaffolded instruction, this study presents scaffolding as a more concrete concept by demonstrating how particular elements of scaffolding create classroom interaction. Additionally, this research provides a relative comparison and contrast of scaffolding as it occurs and creates interaction during two instructional activities thus providing specific recommendations for addressing a pedagogic concern with student motivation in the context of a particular ESL classroom.