The role of scaffolding in developing EFL learners’ paragraph writing

In this study, Vygotsy's (1978, 1986) sociocultural framework of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and scaffolding were used as the theoretical basis to investigate second language writing development. A course in writing paragraphs was presented to two intermediate learners of English, who had not received any particular instruction in paragraph writing so far and thus were novice in this aspect. The course started with two sessions of theoretical instruction on different aspects of paragraph structure and continued by 10 sessions of practice in which the learners were supposed to write paragraphs on predetermined subjects and deliver them to the instructor. Then, collaboratively, they worked on the errors found in the paragraphs and tried to correct them. The errors in the paragraph writing were investigated through the regulatory scale developed by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) and were corrected by the learners with the researcher's developmentally assisted guidance. The result of the study indicated that the scaffolding help of the instructor during the interaction helped the learners to develop step by step within their ZPDs and move towards becoming independent incorrecting errors. The results also revealed that the learners' paragraph writing improved in at least in four aspects: 1. Improving in writing the topic sentence 2. Enriching the paragraph by providing minor supporting sentences, 3. Organizing the paragraph by the use of listing signals, 4. Paying attention to the importance of the points made in the writing and developing ascending and/or descending order paragraphs

کلیدواژه ها:

Scaffolding ، interaction ، zone of proximal development (ZPD) ، paragraph structure ، writing skill