![]() Later, the notion has embraced an academic, but inconsistent and elusive, implication in SLA. Everyone studying second language (L2) education may know that scaffolding, above all, has a non-academic background. 15).Īlthough scaffolding has gained great recognition in the research and development of SLA over the recent decades, the term has developed into an obscure and equivocal construct in a number of respects. Likewise, as Van Lier ( 2004) comments, scaffolding is now alluded to any ‘helping’ or ‘teaching’‚ and “the construct is in danger of becoming meaningless” (p. Some of these metaphorical concepts include apprenticeship (Rogoff 1990), assisted performance (Van Lier 2004), collaborative dialogue (Swain 2000), collaborative discourse (Ellis 1990), contingency (Van Lier 1992), mediated discourse/action (Scollon 2001, 2002), pedagogical interaction (Donato 2000), personal correspondence (Lantolf 2000b), strategic mediation (Johnson 2009), etc. 15), have led to a proliferation of sundry interpretations and refurbishments. Despite the increasing prominence given to scaffolding in SLA research, the equivocal, yet evasive, conception of the notion from its earliest hypothetical framework together with “the ambiguous status of the notion of ZPD‚ and the attendant pedagogizing of it in the processes of scaffolding” (Van Lier 2004, p. The rationale behind the term has increasingly led to the development of much empirical work and theoretical debate in SLA, especially over the recent decades (e.g., Donato 1994 De Guerrero and Villamil 2000 Nassaji and Cumming 2000 Storch 2002 Cotterall and Cohen 2003 Gibbons 2003). A prevailing assumption of scaffolding has originally been that for an assistance to become effective, it needs to occur within the learner’s ZPD (e.g., Scollon 2002 Lantolf 2000a, 2009 Nassaji and Fotos 2011). ![]() The notion is inspired by Vygotsky’s ( 1978) socio-cultural theory of learning, specifically the notion of Zone of Proximal Development ( ZPD) which is conventionally defined as the cognitive gap between what learners can do unaided and what they can do with assistance (Lantolf 2011). The paper then concludes that as long as the nature of scaffolding and its underpinnings in SLA are at stake, future research on the notion will most likely suffer a severe loss of pedagogical and intellectual validity.Īn issue historically central to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research is Bruner’s ( 1983) proposition of “scaffolding” as a metaphor to theorize an assistance mediated through interaction to help a child to perform a new task or function. From the above evidence, it can be argued that scaffolding is not a construct that meets the pedagogical goals of L2 learning and development. Reviewing the texts, we have then found three fundamental points in the definitions of scaffolding, each with specific logical and methodological problems. The second has to do with the range of variation in the conceptual meaning of scaffolding, which normally leads to a state of confusion in the operational definition of the term in the SLA practice and research. To substantiate the claim, we have proposed four underlying factors, including predictability, variability, mediation, and restructuring. ![]() The first and foremost concerns the phenomenological nature of scaffolding in the sense that the original conception of the notion does not support its implication in mainstream second language acquisition (SLA) contexts. ![]() However, there is plenty of evidence that the term is misinterpreted and presents a number of epistemological problems. Scaffolding is one of the key dimensions of the sociocultural theory that has been proposed in a substantial body of work as a potential metaphor for promoting second language (L2) learning. ![]()
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