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The term "scaffolding" refers to adult behaviors that support and guide children's participation in activities, including speech events, enabling the children to extend the range of what they are able to do without assistance. A study examined how scaffolding behavior in support of expository discourse differed among preschool teachers in classroom activities with the same children. Study participants included 12 preschool children who participated in activity sessions (e.g., free play, making paper flowers, or making sandwiches) with three teachers in the Psychology Department nursery of the University of Edinburgh. Classroom discourse was recorded and transcribed, and sections in which a child's expository proposition was followed by adult responses that were semantically contingent upon the child's utterance were analyzed. The adults' responses were coded using social interactionist labels and tallied in terms of the scaffolding functions provided; e.g., shaping the child's utterance or representation through feedback; reinforcing a key phrase; maintaining joint attention; linking propositions to experience; and extending the proposition to a greater number of implications. The study found less scaffolding with 5-year-olds than 3- or 4-year-olds, though the questioning function increased with age. The amount of scaffolding provided differed among the teachers, but the distribution by type of scaffolding was remarkably consistent for all adults. (AC)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert