This paper reports on a study that explored how teachers interacted with groups of university students in learning the target form in a second language. Adopting a sociocultural approach, the data were based on microgenetic analysis of teacher and student discourse in a English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom at a university in Hong Kong, in which undergraduate students were given a rewriting task in teacher–student interaction. The analysis shows that scaffolding is supportive for language learning as appropriate assistance by both the teacher and peers at the right time with the proper focus can mediate learning. The teacher is reported to maintain student involvement in the task by trying to reinforce the comprehension of task demands, contextual meaning, and linguistic features in texts. The study addresses the teacher's and learners' indispensable roles in leading students to focus on the appropriate form and ensure correctness in linguistic production. The combination of appropriate expert and peer involvement in the discourse seems to provide the optimum form of interaction and, therefore, ensure the high quality of mediation in second language classroom.
[Copyright of Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2011.626858]

This study investigates how expert-novice scaffolding and peer-peer scaffolding may facilitate the learning of grammatical forms in tertiary Chinese EFL classrooms and attempts to illustrate the features of different modes of interactions. It was a classroom research study with a quasi-experimental design, in which Chinese tertiary level students from two intact classes in Hong Kong and Wuhan were both given a task of revising a student's writing, focusing on the learning of the relative clause in three interactional scenarios: student-student (S-S), teacher-student (T-S), teacher-student + student-student (T-S + S-S).
On the basis of the microgenetic analysis of classroom discourse complemented with quantitative results, the study has found that scaffolding in T-S + S-S interaction generates the most effective impact on learning the target form in the three settings, followed by T-S interaction and S-S interaction. The learner's Zone of Proximal Development (hereafter ZPD) could be promoted most effectively in T-S + S-S interaction due to high quality of scaffolding functions, whereas there is little evidence of extension in the learner's ZPD in T-S and S-S interactions due to a lower quality of scaffolding functions. Moreover, the effective use of the seven scaffolding functions, i.e., Recruitment, Simplifying the task, Direction Maintenance, Marking Critical Features, Frustration Control, Demonstration, and Feedback, in T-S + S-S interaction, seems to stretch the tertiary Chinese students' grammatical competence to a greater extent than in the other two settings. More importantly, the findings have highlighted the importance of helping students notice the gap in their knowledge, promoting self-regulated learning of target forms, and encouraging independent learning when the teacher provides appropriate support.
The study has both theoretical and pedagogical significance. Theoretically, it has shown that grammar learning in EFL classrooms does not happen

This paper explores the sociolinguistic awareness in English of tertiary level students in Hong Kong and Wuhan (Mainland China). The language data consisted of specific instances when a native speaker presenter made changes, in the course of oral delivery, to the written text of a conference paper that she had prepared in advance. Matched pairs of sentences/utterances were selected and in each pair the written version was placed side by side with the spoken version. When native speakers were asked to judge which version had been written and which had been spoken, their responses indicated that the changes were based on sociolinguistic intuitions shared by other native speakers. For the present study, the same matched pairs of utterances were given to tertiary-level students of English in Hong Kong and Wuhan. The resulting data are used to explore the extent to which students have access to the same sociolinguistic intuitions as native speakers. Comparisons are also made between the responses of students in the two settings as well as between the responses of English and non-English majors in Wuhan.
[Copyright of Language Awareness is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658410608668853 ]