Abstract:

This paper reports an ongoing joint research project in which researchers in Applied Linguistics and in Neuroscience at universities in Japan explore new ways to investigate instructional scaffolding, which is often said to facilitate students’ flow in an EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. The primary purpose of this project is to see whether or not instructional scaffolding enhances students’ flow during group work, which requires higher-order skill (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001) in a classroom. Instructional scaffolding, in this study, is defined as contingent scaffolding, that is, the support given during the learning process, which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve his/her leaning goals (Sawyer, 2006). Flow is defined as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.4). Students’ temporally changing flow states are subjectively reported and associated with the synchronization of brain activities, which are measured using ultra-small NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) devices. The NIRS device is a brain imaging instrument designed and developed to measure simultaneously the brain response of multiple participants at the same time while taking part in a particular activity. Pre- and post-questionnaires on students’ flow state based on the Dispositional Flow Scale-2 and the Flow State Scale-2 (Jackson & Eklund, 2002) are conducted. Watching video clips of their own group work, the students retrospectively self-evaluate their subjective flow state and conceived challenge level of the work as additional covariate at each moment on a 7-point Likert scale (1: extremely low to 7: extremely high). Background, research questions, and an experiment design of this study will be described in the paper.

Keywords:

Instructional Scaffolding, Flow, NIRS, EFL.