Research from interactionist second language acquisition and sociocultural theoretical perspectives shows that referential questions are important for learning, but also, that they can be difficult for English language learners (ELLs) to understand and produce answers to. By integrating analytical tools from both traditions, this study examined the scaffolding functions of a fifth grade teacher's talk. The study found that the teacher utilized various communicative moves to engage ELLs in referential questions. Examples illustrating these communicative moves and their scaffolding functions are provided. Implications from these findings for teacher education are discussed
Mainstream ESL pedagogy has been dominated by monolingual methods for the past century, but the default teaching mode in many EFL contexts is in fact bilingual. A challenge we currently face is to find fresh ways of describing such bilingual teaching. This paper attempts to begin to do so by taking the notions of scaffolding and intertextuality – both deriving from monolingual, monocultural contexts – and applying these to Thai university English classes. Episodes of teacher talk from four classes are examined. It is found that the scaffolding metaphor can readily be applied to bilingual episodes; and that an intertextual analysis across two languages