Interaction, contextual and linguistic scaffolding : Important didactic aspects, but are they present in the classrooms?

The aim of this essay is to investigate the presence or non presence of a concept of teaching practice in high school classrooms. This concept which purpose is to improve the teaching practice in foreign language classrooms, is developed by researches in the Netherlands (Hajer & Meestringa, 2010). The main idea of the concept is to increase the interaction between the students and to ensure a high use of contextual and linguistic support from the teacher. The first research question is thereby whether this concept is present, and if so, to which extent, in five different foreign language classrooms. The second is to explore the coherence between the teachers’ and the students’ opinions concerning this eventual presence. To answer these questions, a quantitative method in the shape of a 10 steps questionnaire, has been distributed to five teachers and their groups of totally 109 students. The analysis shows a certain presence of the concept and a divergence between the teachers’ and the students’ answers. It seems that the teachers have a more positive view of their teaching practice than what is represented in the students’ answers