Theory of Scaffolding
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Scaffolding Theory was first introduced in the late 1950s by Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist. He used the term to describe young children's oral language acquisition. Helped by their parents when they first start learning to speak, young children are provided with instinctive structures to learn a language. Bed-time stories and read alouds are classic examples (Daniels, 1994). Wood, Bruner, and Ross's (1976) idea of scaffolding also parallels Vygotskys work. This concept has been further developed by Jesper Hoffmeyer as 'semiotic scaffolding'. Though the term was never used by Vygotsky, interactional support and the process by which adults mediate a childs attempts to take on new learning has come to be termed "scaffolding." Scaffolding represents the helpful interactions between adult and child that enable the child to do something beyond his or her independent efforts. A scaffold is a temporary framework that is put up for support and access to meaning and taken away as needed when the child secures control of success with a task. Cazden (1983) defined a scaffold as a temporary framework for construction in progress (p. 6). For example, parents seem to know intuitively how to scaffold their childrens attempts at negotiating meaning through oral language. The construction of a scaffold occurs at a time where the child may not be able to articulate or explore learning independently. The scaffolds provided by the tutor do not change the nature or difficulty level of the task; instead, the scaffolds provided allow the student to successfully complete the task.
In writing instruction, typically support is presented in verbal form (discourse). The writing tutor engages the learner's attention, calibrates the task, motivates the student, identifies relevant task features, controls for frustration, and demonstrates as needed (Rodgers, 2004). Through joint activities, the teacher scaffolds conversation to maximize the development of a childs intrapsychological functioning. In this process, the adult controls the elements of the task that are beyond the childs ability all the while increasing the expectations of what the child is able to do. Speech, a critical tool to scaffold thinking and responding, plays a crucial role in the development of higher psychological processes (Luria, 1979) because it enables thinking to be more abstract, flexible, and independent (Bodrova & Leong, 1996). From a Vygotskian perspective, talk and action work together with the sociocultural fabric of the writing event to shape a childs construction of awareness and performance (Dorn, 1996). Dialogue may range from casual talk to deliberate explanations about features of written language. The talk embedded in the actions of the literacy event shapes the childs learning as the tutor regulates her language to conform to the childs degrees of understanding. Clay (2005) shows that what may seem like casual conversational exchanges between tutor and student actually offer many opportunities for fostering cognitive development, language learning, story composition for writing, and reading comprehension. Conversations facilitate generative, constructive, experimental, and developmental speech and writing in the development of new ideas (Smagorinsky, 2007).