Scaffolding the learning-to-teach process in EFL Teacher Education: An analysis of the tutoring sessions between a practicum supervisor and the student-teachers

Voices and views. English language issues from different perspectives

Editorial Design

Lugar: Córdoba ; Año: 2019; p. 48 - 86

Helping learners go through their evolving zones of proximal development (ZPD) and gradually develop more complex developmental levels requires teachers to carefully scaffold their students? learning. Scaffolding has been defined as an interactive dialogic construct in which all the participants involved play a crucial role. The literature reveals that most research in scaffolding has focused considerable attention on the multiplicity of types of support that teachers can provide. The distinct features of scaffolding are still not completely understood. This research study seeks to examine how a supervisor scaffolds the student-teachers? learning-to-teach process in the context of one-to-one tutoring sessions in an EFL Teacher Education programme in Córdoba, Argentina. The audio-recordings of the sessions were transcribed verbatim and both macro and micro-level analyses were carried out. Two main frameworks ? the Model of Contingent Teaching and the Contingent Shift Framework ? were employed to describe how scaffolding unfolds and measure to what extent scaffolding occurs in the one-to-one tutoring sessions. The findings indicate that scaffolding implies two main phases: diagnosis and intervention. In the former, the supervisor was found to elicit considerable information from the student-teachers and challenge them the most whereas in the latter, she offered help mainly by means of feedback, explaining and instructing and challenged them the least. Furthermore, about 50% of the interactions analysed were found to be contingent, and thus scaffolding instances since she adapted her degree of control to their level of understanding. Although links can be established between the strategies deployed by the supervisor and supervisory roles and skills, the ways in which the supervisor?s scaffolded help is realized should be understood in relation to the function it serves and how it accommodates the student-teachers? level of understanding in order to accurately depict the scaffolding process.