Rethinking Scaffolding: Examining Negotiation of Meaning in an ESL Storytelling Task

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate what differentiated higher quality from lower quality negotiation-of-meaning interactions as well as the consequences of these interactions in a storytelling task. Participants included 21 students enrolled in ESL classes who told a personal narrative to a small audience consisting of the teacher and two classmates. A question-and-answer session immediately followed the first telling, after which the storyteller moved to a new audience and retold the story. Data analysis focused on relating what had happened during the negotiation sessions to the presence or absence of improvement in the second telling. Results indicated that several factors seemed to contribute to improved storytelling, including four types of interactional moves displayed by the teachers. Beyond the teachers' contributions, however, improved storytelling seemed influenced as much by the initial story's characteristics, by the storyteller's responsiveness to the audience in answering questions during the negotiation session, and by the storyteller's willingness or unwillingness to alter the story. A major contribution of this study is to expand the construct of scaffolding: Researchers and practitioners typically focus on the actions of the more knowledgeable other in scaffolding whereas this study suggests that the learner plays a critical role in any instance of scaffolding. T he focus in this study was to determine whether and how the performance of L2 learners of English on a storytelling task could be influenced by a session involving negotiation of meaning (NOM) that occurred between two tellings of the story. We were interested in what differentiated higher from lower quality negotiation interactions and whether we could trace any effect of the scaffolding afforded by the