Assessing Scaffolding Tools Adopted in Emergency Remote Teaching for English Public Speaking

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-494-5_32How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Scaffolding; Emergency Remote Teaching; Assessment; English Public Speaking

Abstract

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, emergency remote teaching, blended teaching, and other modes of technology-mediated teaching have been practiced in order to sustain education under stringent social distancing requirements. This study examines the teaching and learning process and the outcome of the “English Public Speaking” course guided by the scaffolding theory, under the emergency remote circumstances in Shanghai during the spring semester of 2022. The participants consisted of 53 non-English major undergraduate students who took the course at a key university in P.R. China. During emergency remote teaching, the course was designed with task-based, cooperative, and inquiry-based activities to be conducted around the zone of proximal development (ZPD) of students’English public speaking skills through “teacher-learner dialogue” (e.g. heuristic explanation, topic selection feedback, teacher exemplary evaluation) and “learner-learner dialogue” (e.g. group discussion, peer assessment), using scaffolding instruction or assistance from the teacher, peers, and success criteria and thus offer diverse learning assessments. The study adopts a mixed-methods research approach to collect data from multiple sources such as pre-test and post-test scores, students’ course feedback questionnaires, post-speech self-assessment assignments, and six students’ in-depth interview data. The results show that scaffolding can improve students’ public speaking skills, boost their self-efficacy, and foster a friendly socio-affective community with the instructor and peers. Additionally, the alignment of various scaffolds in the English public speaking education domain can construct an integral nexus in teaching and learning, which enhances the vibrancy of the online classroom. Pedagogical implications for classroom teaching are also discussed in the study.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yimeng Zhu
AU  - Jiangbo Wan
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/08/22
TI  - Assessing Scaffolding Tools Adopted in Emergency Remote Teaching for English Public Speaking
BT  - Proceedings of the Pacific-Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 481
EP  - 501
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-494-5_32
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-494-5_32
ID  - Zhu2024
ER  -