A four-category intervention analysis of EFL teachers’ Scaffolding Roles in Short-Focused Conversations

Abstract

A new perspective, adapted from John Heron’s classification of counselor-client interactions, is proposed to explore teachers’ Scaffolding Roles (SRs). To provide a solid foundation for such an adaptation, both the theoretical and practical supports were put forward. First, the nature of the counselor’s interventions and the construct of scaffolding were collated in terms of their essential features proposed in the related studies. It was concluded that the essential features of the counselor’s interventions including the integration of emotional, interpersonal, and political competence, moment-to-moment interactions with the ongoing support, goal-directedness, and contingent assistance are comparable, and even compatible with the construct of scaffolding. As a result, the adapted framework was put into practice in the EFL context to provide the statistical support. Applying the framework, 500 Short-Focused Conversations (SFCs) of 30 Iranian EFL teachers were scrutinized according to which four SRs (i.e., prescriptive, informative, confronting and catalytic) have been employed. Later, the possible relationship between the teachers’ choice of SRs and three main factors including their scaffolding practices, the relative degree of support in SFCs, and their qualification were investigated through Kruskal-Wallis H and Chi-Square tests. In sum, via the employment of the quantitative and qualitative analyses, the findings of the study confirmed the sensitivity of the model to the notion of fading, an indispensable stage of scaffolding, as the learners’ growth of autonomy and teachers’ employment of the catalytic role were closely associated.