Abstract
While much attention has been focused—in the field of teacher expertise—on expert teachers’ cognitive and behavioral characteristics, little attention has been devoted to how expert teachers reciprocally interact with the learning process. To bridge this gap in knowledge, this study seeks to explore primary-school EFL (English as a Foreign Language)—teacher expertise in the area of scaffolding. A comparison has been made among 2 expert EFL teachers, 20 experienced non-expert teachers, and 2 novice teachers in Chinese primary-school settings. By adopting a qualitative method of inquiry using interviews, classroom observations, and stimulated recalls, (yet with a quantitative aspect incorporating data analysis), the study demonstrates that expert teachers show a tendency to use scaffolding strategies more frequently and appropriately. These findings suggest that more open-ended activities be conducted to allow for scaffolding in EFL classrooms and that ESL/EFL teacher education raise scaffolding awareness in pre-service and in-service teachers.
Highlights
Teacher expertise refers to expert teachers’ cognitive and behavioral characteristics, including features of pedagogical reasoning, knowledge structures, beliefs, and teaching performance, etc
Drawing on sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and scaffolding, the current study has focused on the scaffolding activities of expert English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in Chinese primary schools via the relative approach (Chi, 2011), which focuses on characterizing expertise by looking into the ways how an expert excels a non-expert through comparison
The results show that expert EFL teachers performed quantitatively and qualitatively better than non-expert ones in applying scaffolded feedback: they scaffolded students’ learning more frequently using more scaffolding strategies, especially the less explicit ones; they showed a greater tendency to scaffold in a graduated manner by first attempting implicit strategies in most cases
Summary
Teacher expertise refers to expert teachers’ cognitive and behavioral characteristics, including features of pedagogical reasoning, knowledge structures, beliefs, and teaching performance, etc. This study attempts to bridge this gap via a comparative study of the scaffolding differences among expert teachers, experienced non-expert teachers, and novice teachers in Chinese primary schools This kind of study is of significance as English as a foreign language (EFL) is an important part of the curricula for primary and secondary schools in China. Large class teaching poses challenges for teachers in terms of the classroom management of teaching and learning. This is due to the fact that younger learners are in urgent need of teacherdirected scaffolding (Cameron, 2001), especially that of the contingent type occurring in teacher-student interaction. Exploring expert EFL teachers’ use of scaffolding makes sense in that it elucidates foreign language teacher education and classroom teaching practices
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