by Minh Hue Nguyen
Nguyen, M.H. and Vu, T.V. (2010). Scaffolding for pre-service teachers of English in a tutoring program. Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Research Conference, Faculty of English Language Teacher Education, University of Languages and International Studies, VNU, Hanoi, Vietnam.
TESOL students preparing for their teaching career find the teaching practice component of their BA-TESOL program a... more
TESOL students preparing for their teaching career find the teaching practice component of their BA-TESOL program a challenge since most of them lack experience in teaching and this is the first time they bring the theory of language teaching and learning into practice. In order to help the students meet the challenge and better prepare themselves for their future teaching, the Tutoring Program for fourth year fast-track TESOL students at University of Languages and International Studies (ULIS), which offered opportunities for teacher trainees to tutor sophomores, adopted a scaffolding approach following Sociocultural Theory. In this paper, we review theory and research related to scaffolding within the sociocultural framework and reflect on the features of scaffolding embedded within the Tutoring Program that we were directly involved in as supervisors. The reflection is backed up with evidence from the supervisors’ observation and on-going reflection, the teachers’ trainees’ reflection throughout the program and their program evaluation conducted at the end of the course. On reflection, we found that the program successfully incorporated a number of scaffolding features namely clear goals, clear instructions, pre-established evaluation criteria, promotion of cooperative tasks, feedback from peers and supervisors, and promotion of interest and positive attitudes. These features of scaffolding are congruous with most of the features of successful scaffolding discussed in the literature. The scaffolding offered by the program contributed significantly to the development of the teacher trainees’ teaching competence, interest and positive attitudes towards teaching career. However, our reflection also reveals a lack of supervisors’ modelling, which is an effective scaffolding feature suggested in past research. Besides, facility support also revealed some shortcomings that should be addressed in future programs. These findings have important implications for the supervisors to make informed decisions on their organization of scaffolding opportunities in subsequent tutoring programs. They can also be useful for language teacher trainers who are interested in incorporating scaffolding within their teacher training program.
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