Providing cognitive and affective scaffolding through teaching strategies: Applying linguistic politeness to the educational context

Abstract

Providing students with cognitive and affective support is generally recognised as important to their successful learning. There is an intuitive recognition of the two types of support being related, but little research explains how such a relationship may be manifested in teaching strategies, or what conditions tutors' strategic choices in relation to those two types of support. Research on politeness provides plausible answers to those questions. In this paper we present a model of teachers selecting corrective feedback based on the politeness notion of face. We adapt the existing definition of face to the educational genre and we demonstrate how it can be used to relate cognitive and affective scaffolding and to model the selection of teaching strategies given specific contexts. © Springer-Verlag 2004 References.