- What is 'Learner Language'?
- Communication Tasks
- Ways of Seeing Learner Language
- Multimedia Activities
- Chinese
- Japanese
- Korean
- Persian
- Spanish
- LL Bibliography
- Project Background
Interaction: Activity 3
Co-construction and scaffolding in interaction
Watch Sebastian and Maximus as they interact in the Comparison Task. In this excerpt, one of them has difficulty expressing his ideas. What words is the speaker having difficulty with? What scaffolding does the partner provide in each case? Do they end up with an appropriate expression or correct structure?
Comparison Task
Transcript (PDF)
Please type your answers to the questions in the box below.
When you have finished typing your answer, click to compare your response with the Learner Language staff response.
Sebastian has difficulty finding the word for “stone” in Japanese and Maximus provides scaffolding with the word “ishi [stone].” Sebastian immediately uses the word and completes the sentence. His repetition of the word seems to confirm that that was the word he was looking for and he appears to have learned it. Then similar scaffolding on vocabulary occurs again immediately. When Sebastian uses the English word “fancy” with Japanese pronunciation, Maximus provides the Japanese word “suteki [lovely]”. Sebastian, again, reformulates the sentence using suteki. Working together, the learners end up with appropriate expressions in both cases.
