Teachers’ Strategies in Providing Scaffolding in English for Young Learners Classroom

Abstract

The high demand for English to be taught at the primary level in Indonesia fosters the needs of EYL teachers who are qualified in terms of teaching and mastering content knowledge. Language proficiency is considered as one of the factors which determine the quality of English teacher (Richards, 2015). This study, therefore, aims at scrutinizing the extent to which English for young learners' teachers provide scaffolding as well as exploring their language proficiency and its influence in providing scaffolding in the classroom. Employing a descriptive qualitative study, two English teachers with a high level of proficiency were invited to become the participants. Through classroom observation followed by teacher interviews, it is found that teachers employed several types of scaffolding such as modeling, bridging, and contextualizing. Furthermore, language proficiency can help the teachers in providing scaffolding to young learners in terms of providing good language models, maintaining the use of English in the classroom, giving explanations and instructions in English, and providing examples of words and grammatical structures.