Understanding Scaffolding in Peer Interactions Among Chinese University Students in an Intact EFL Classroom

Abstract

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.