Lexical scaffolding in immersion classroom discourse

Research in the field of vocabulary learning has shown that child L2 learners need to meet words again and again in new contexts in order to expand and deepen their word knowledge. In an instructional setting, cognitive processing is enhanced not only by the interplay between language use and metalinguistic reflection during classroom interaction but also by the activation and articulation of different sources of knowledge. Building on this research within a socio-cognitive perspective, we conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of interactional sequences of lexical scaffolding during read-aloud activities in a French immersion primary school in Montreal. In a class composed of a mixture of French dominant, English dominant and bilingual eight-year-olds, French and English versions of the same storybook were read aloud and discussed in alternate lessons by two different teachers. The analyses revealed differences between the two teachers’ lexical scaffolding strategies. While the French teacher tended to adopt a metalinguistic focus to elicit the meanings of difficult words, the English teacher sought more to recycle and explore vocabulary in contexts related to the story’s content and students’ prior experiences and to exploit knowledge of students’ first language. These results point to the pedagogical potential of lexical scaffolding that goes beyond word definitions and aims instead to increase learners’ depth of processing through connections to cross-lingual, epistemic and experiential knowledge.