Understanding Scaffolding in Peer Interactions Among Chinese University Students in an Intact EFL Classroom
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22416397 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Qin Yin (0000-0003-1345-9905, School of Education, Communication, and Language Science Newcastle University, UK, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England United Kingdom), Citing Li (0000-0002-5199-6966, School of English Studies Shanghai International Studies University Shanghai China, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-09 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0802-6106 • E-ISSN: 1473-4192 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/ijal.70290 |
| OpenAlex | W7167825179 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 56 |
While scaffolding has long been widely recognized as central to learning from a sociocultural perspective, prior studies have largely focused on identifying its characteristics or interactional strategies, leaving its interactional processes underexplored. This study adopts a conversation‐analysis (CA)‐informed sociocultural approach to investigate how scaffolding was interactionally enacted in peer group interactions among English as a foreign language (EFL) students at a Chinese university. The findings reveal two recurrent interactional routes to peer scaffolding: dynamic contingent support, through which diagnosis and assistance were interwoven within ongoing reasoning instead of being organized as a sequential ‘diagnosis‐then‐support’ process and thinking with divergent perspectives, through which alternative viewpoints were interactionally accommodated and assimilated into shared mediational resources. The study advances our understanding of scaffolding by specifying its micro‐interactional foundations and it details the pedagogical implications of this understanding for efforts to facilitate productive peer discussions in university EFL classrooms.
English as a foreign language · Foreign language · Language acquisition · Scaffold · Sociocultural evolution · Viewpoints · Zone of proximal development · Educational and Psychological Assessments · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
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Scaffolding student learning
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Promoting teacher scaffolding in small-group work
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Conversation Analysis and language learning
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| Highly cited | No |
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