Moving Beyond Yes or No: Shifting From OverScaffolding to Contingent Scaffolding in Literacy Instruction With Emergent Bilingual Students

Building on theories of scaffolding and previous research on scaffolding between adults and children, this article provides empirical examples of over-scaffolding as it occurs in peer-topeer literacy activities among elementary-level emergent bilingual students. In their analysis of data from the first year of a design-based research project (Bradley & Reinking, 2011) consisting of a cross-aged peer-tutoring program, the authors shed light on how their curriculum tools unintentionally overscaffolded students’ interactions. Over-scaffolding limited students’ productive and substantive engagement and inadvertently led students to enact the prevalent initiate-respondevaluate discourse pattern in their partner discussions. The broader phenomena of over-scaffolding in many classrooms may position emergent bilinguals as passive respondents in literacy interactions rather than as active participants in their language and literacy learning. To ensure that learners are participating and teachers and tutors are scaffolding literacy practices appropriately, the authors advocate for responsive, contingent scaffolding to keep learners productively engaged. The aim is for the findings and implications to help readers reexamine their own interactive literacy practices and research