Investigating the scaffolding strategies related to risk-taking during classroom interaction

Abstract

This study purports to investigate how some selected aspects of the teacher’s interactional behaviour can serve as scaffoldings for students’ risk-taking. This latter is a construct that, if adopted by students, leads to an increase in both the quality and the quantity of their participation in classroom interaction. It is found that teacher’s use of referential questions is positively related to a surge in risktaking. Moreover, the provision of varied pauses in the forms of extended wait times before students’ responses and short wait times after students have finished responding to questions co-occurred with relatively more risk-taking. It was also established that using strategies prompting students to respond or answer questions such as clarification requests and clues relates positively to better risk-taking. Such interactional behaviours are deemed scaffoldings insofar as they mediate students’ risk taking within their zone of proximal development as suggested by the socio-cultural theory on interaction. This is so because the results of this study suggest that students take more turns at speaking, provide more one-word and multi-word responses and self-initiations, and their productions are to a higher extent relevant, correct and/or complete than when the teacher relies on other alternatives to these aspects of interaction. Recommendations are directed to teachers to be constantly adaptive, to use interactional behaviours that assist students in taking better risks. As for students, it is worthwhile to adopt such a strategy which is established to be characterizing good and successful language learners.