Classroom interactions of teachers and elementary school Pupils as observed during a musical project in a Japanese elementary school

This study focuses on the nature of classroom interactions in an EFL classroom context among young learners from a socio-cultural theoretical perspective. During the year 2007, a musical project was carried out at a public elementary school in Osaka, Japan; all the fifth graders, 126 students, aged 10–11, participated in the musical project. Of these, thirty-two students of class A (15 boys and 17 girls) participated in the present study for classroom video recordings. Seven classroom lessons lasting 45 min each were conducted between September 2007 and January 2008. The data from three protocols were transcribed into a written format from the original video recordings and a teacher’s observation notes were also obtained. The researchers investigated how the teachers scaffold the students’ use of language, how their scaffolding pattern changes over time, and how students’ interaction patterns in the classroom change over time. In addition to teacher–student scaffolding patterns, student–student scaffolding was observed in a later classroom session. The findings indicate that teachers’ scaffolding patterns changed over time as shown in the three protocols. During the transition from Protocol 1, Protocol 2 and Protocol 3, teacher–student scaffolding was gradually reduced as students had learned to produce their own dialogs. Further, peer-scaffolding was observed for the first time in Protocol 3. Although this musical project was quite challenging for the learners, the study shows that if sufficient scaffolding is provided, learners are clearly able to improve their current language level.