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Scaffold learning5/8/2023 This confidence carries over into other areas of their lives, inside and outside the classroom. They feel a sense of accomplishment when they can complete tasks that were once difficult. This gradual decrease in the level of support is what constitutes the scaffolding process. With scaffold learning, students build confidence as they master new concepts. At the beginning of the scaffolding process, the teacher provides a lot of support. I will also include some observations about classroom practice based on a survey of selected course books. In education, scaffolding is a way for teachers to provide support while students master new concepts and skills. I draw mainly on my own extensive experience as a teacher educator for over 20 years working with pre-service English teachers of bilingual students in Singapore schools and in-service teachers attending professional development courses or pursuing Master's degree studies, as well as college English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers from the People's Republic of China receiving postgraduate teaching certification in English language teaching (ELT) and higher degree qualifications in my university each year. I will also suggest how much of the research is getting through to teachers and being taken up in day-to-day teaching of English. For each area I briefly review the relevant research to highlight how teachers can potentially apply the research findings to scaffold learning processes in speaking. I will discuss these three areas in terms of level of research application – where research is not applied well (task repetition), where it is reasonably well applied (pre-task planning), and where it may have been over-applied (communication strategies). Scaffolding can be used to help a person of any age learn something new, but in the classroom it is most often used with younger students (preschool and elementary school) since they are learning new skills and concepts they havent been exposed to before most frequently. This article is a personal view of the application of results from three areas of research that I believe are relevant to developing second language speaking in the classroom: task repetition, pre-task planning and communication strategies.
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