11

What is scaffolding and how do you do

it?

If you google ‘scaffolding’ or any of its derivatives, you will get a lot of hits like these:

This article stresses the importance of scaffolding academic language for second language
learners, emphasizing active student involvement.
Time was taken to explore and use descriptive language while hunting. I scaffolded the children’s
search using questioning based on positional terms.
I structured carefully because they are not native English speakers. I scaffolded and I summarized.
Since this was an introduction to multimodal composition for these students, I scaffolded it by
putting a folder of shoe images on their desktops.

Scaffolding has become such a buzz term that it’s in danger of losing any meaning whatsoever.
Teachers and trainers regularly talk about their role in ‘scaffolding’ learning, but if you unpick
their examples, it’s difficult to distinguish these from the kind of simple question-and-answer
sequences that have always characterized effective teaching. Here, for example, is an extract
that Rod Ellis (2003: 181) uses to exemplify scaffolding:

Teacher:I want you to tell me what you can see in the picture or what’s wrong with the picture.
Learner:A /paik/ (= bike).
Teacher:A cycle, yes. But what’s wrong?
Learner:/ret/ (= red).
Teacher:It’s red, yes. What’s wrong with it?
Learner:Black.
Teacher:Black. Good. Black what?
Learner:Black /taes/ (= tyres).
Ellis explains that ‘the teacher is able to draw on his experience of communicating with low-level
proficiency learners to adjust the demands of the task and to scaffold the interaction so that a
successful outcome is reached’ (2003: 182). It seems to me, however, that this is simply a
sequence of teacher-initiated display questions following the traditional IRF (initiate-respond-
follow-up) pattern of classroom discourse. There is no real evidence that the learner has
‘appropriated’ any of the teacher’s own language ‘material’, even if (according to Ellis) this is
the first time he has produced a two-word utterance. This only notionally embodies Bruner’s
definition of scaffolding as ‘the steps taken to reduce the degree of freedom in carrying out
some tasks so that the child can concentrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of
acquiring’ (quoted in Gibbons 2002: 10).

What, then, are the ‘steps’ that Bruner refers to? Looking at the literature on scaffolding, a
number of key features have been identified. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976, quoted in Ellis
2003: 181) in one of the first attempts to define the term, itemize six:

1. recruiting interest in the task

2. simplifying the task
3. maintaining pursuit of the goal
4. marking critical features and discrepancies between what has been produced and the ideal
solution
5. controlling frustration during problem solving
6. demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed.

Here is another instance of teacher-learner talk (from Johnson 1995: 23) which perhaps comes
nearer to meeting these criteria:

Teacher:Vin, have you ever been to the movies? What’s your favourite movie?
Learner:Big.
Teacher:Big, OK, that’s a good movie, that was about a little boy inside a big man, wasn’t it?
Learner:Yeah, boy get surprise all the time.
Teacher:Yes, he was surprised, wasn’t he? Usually little boys don’t do the things that men do,
do they?
Learner:No, little boy no drink.
Teacher:That’s right, little boys don’t drink.

Notice how the teacher ‘recruits interest in the task’ by means of judicious question-asking, and
‘maintains pursuit of the [conversational goal]’, while at the same time ‘marking discrepancies’
by recasting the learner’s flawed utterances into a more target-like form (in the last two teacher
turns).
While the metaphor of scaffolding implies support, it also implies impermanence. What is not
demonstrated in the above extract (nor included in Wood, Bruner and Ross’s original scheme),
is the gradual relinquishing of the teacher’s role as the learner appropriates the targeted skill –
what one writer calls ‘transfer of control’: ‘As students internalize new procedures and routines,
they should take a greater responsibility for controlling the progress of the task such that the
amount of interaction may actually increase as the student becomes more competent’
(Applebee 1986, quoted in Foley 1994).

Another important feature of scaffolding is what van Lier (1996: 195) calls the ‘principle of
continuity’, i.e. that ‘there are repeated occurrences, often over a protracted period of time, of
a complex of actions, characterized by a mixture of ritual repetition and variations’. That is to
say, scaffolded learning is not a one-off event, but is embedded in repeated, semi-ritualized,
co-authored language-mediated activities, typical of many classroom routines such as games
and the opening class chat. These constitute part of what Mercer (1995: 84) calls the ‘long
conversation’ of teacher-learner interaction, in which ‘talk is used to construct knowledge’:

This is a social, historical process, in the sense that the talk generates its own context and
continuity, so that the knowledge that is created carries with it echoes of the conversations in
which it was generated (ibid.).

Any definition of scaffolding, therefore, needs to incorporate the view that this kind of
interaction is a locus for learning opportunities, and is not simply a way of modelling,
supporting, or practising interaction. Such a view is consistent with the claims made by
researchers of first language development to the effect that conversational interaction, rather
than being the result of language learning, is a precondition for it: ‘One [first] learns how to do
conversation, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction syntactic structures
are developed’ (Hatch 1978: 404). Scaffolding, in short, is the process whereby, with the help
of a ‘better other’, ‘one learns how to do conversation’.

Questions for discussion

1. How have you heard the term ‘scaffolding’ used? Why do you think, as a metaphor for
teaching, it has become so popular?

2. What is different about scaffolding, compared to more traditional forms of teacher-learner

interaction?
3. The features of scaffolding identified by Wood, Bruner and Ross (such as ‘recruiting interest
in the task’) pertain to teaching in general, and not language teaching specifically. In what ways
could they be realized in the language classroom?

4. Bruner characterized scaffolding as ‘the steps taken to reduce the degree of freedom in
carrying out some tasks’. However, allowing learners freedom (to express their own meanings,
to communicate fluently, etc.) is a fundamental premise of communicative language teaching. Is
there a tension between the need for freedom and the need (at times) to reduce this freedom?
Put another way, is scaffolding always appropriate?

5. In the extract (from Johnson 1995) in which the teacher and the learner discuss the movie
Big, there is no overt correction of the learner’s errors. Is there a place for error correction
within scaffolding, or is this a contradiction in terms?

6. The importance of ‘semi-ritualized’ activities is mentioned. What does this mean? What other
kinds of classroom activities might have a ritualized quality, and, by extension, might promote
scaffolding?

7. ‘The knowledge that is created carries with it echoes of the conversations in which it was
generated’ (Mercer 1995: 84). What does this mean exactly, and how might it apply to the
learning of grammar or vocabulary?

8. If ‘doing conversation’ is a precondition for language learning, rather than a result of language
learning, what implications might this have on the way that courses and lessons are structured?

References
Ellis, R. (2003) Task-based Language Learning and Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Foley, J. (1994) ‘Key concepts in ELT: Scaffolding’. ELT Journal, 48, 1, 101.

Gibbons, P. (2002) Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning: Teaching Second Language

Learners in the Mainstream Classroom, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hatch, E. (1978) ‘Discourse analysis and second language acquisition’, in Hatch, E. (ed.),
Second Language Acquisition: A Book of Readings, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Johnson, K. (1995) Understanding Communication in Second Language Classrooms,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mercer, N. (1995) The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk amongst Teachers and
Learners, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

van Lier, L. (1996) Interaction in the Language Curriculum, London: Longman.

Wood, D., Bruner, J. and Ross, G. (1976) ‘The role of tutoring in problem-solving’, Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89.

To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/s-is-for-scaffolding/