Scaffolding to Equip Taiwanese Medical Students with Fundamental Skills for Spoken English

Abstract

This qualitative study aimed to investigate if a flipped classroom, activity-based approach could help equip tertiary Taiwanese medical students with fundamental English conversation abilities to prepare them for their future career. Relying on Vygotskian socio cultural conceptual framework, learning to accomplish an activity with scaffolding can help one internalize or acquire the targeted language skills, required to achieve fluent spoken English abilities. The participants of this research were twenty-two freshman medical students from the required freshman English conversation class at a university in southern Taiwan. The data sets included (1) pre-course questionnaire, (2) journal writing, (3) scripts of two informed speech, (4) two oral reports, (5) semi-structured interviews, and (6) field notes based on class observations. To cope with the common problems, found in today’s classroom in Taiwan, from students’ increasing range of individual differences, inactive students, time limit, frequent large class size, and limited opportunities for students to practice the targeted language skills, the findings suggested that this flipped classroom, strategy-based approach provided students obvious assistance to accomplish informed speeches.