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Rethinking Scaffolding: Examining Negotiation of Meaning in an ESL Storytelling Task
Author(s) -
KO JUNGMIN,
SCHALLERT DIANE L.,
WALTERS KEITH
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3588506
Subject(s) - storytelling , negotiation , meaning (existential) , linguistics , task (project management) , psychology , scaffold , sociology , pedagogy , computer science , narrative , philosophy , engineering , social science , psychotherapist , systems engineering , database
The purpose of this study was to investigate what differentiated higher quality from lower quality negotiation‐of‐meaning interactions as well as the consequences of these interactions in a storytelling task. Participants included 21 students enrolled in ESL classes who told a personal narrative to a small audience consisting of the teacher and two classmates. A question‐and‐answer session immediately followed the first telling, after which the storyteller moved to a new audience and retold the story. Data analysis focused on relating what had happened during the negotiation sessions to the presence or absence of improvement in the second telling. Results indicated that several factors seemed to contribute to improved storytelling, including four types of interactional moves displayed by the teachers. Beyond the teachers' contributions, however, improved storytelling seemed influenced as much by the initial story's characteristics, by the storyteller's responsiveness to the audience in answering questions during the negotiation session, and by the storyteller's willingness or unwillingness to alter the story. A major contribution of this study is to expand the construct of scaffolding: Researchers and practitioners typically focus on the actions of the more knowledgeable other in scaffolding whereas this study suggests that the learner plays a critical role in any instance of scaffolding.