Exploring teacher and peer mediation in elementary EFL classroom interactions

Résumé En

This research work utilized corpora collected from six elementary school teachers' English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons and examined the episodes of teacher and peer mediation during the classroom activities. This work is based on sociocultural and interactionist perspectives on foreign language learning. These standpoints provided the study with a conceptual framework and guided the choice of research design and analysis methods. The study was conducted in a French Polynesian context, and aimed to explore: a) the conditions and instances in which mediation occurred, b) the forms of mediational means the teachers and peers employed, and c) the reactions of the learners to the mediational support provided to them. The data for this research work were gathered via videotaped lessons and the corpus obtained was transcribed and analyzed by using a computer‐ assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), ATLAS.ti. The data were explored and segmented by studying the transcripts in association with the videotaped material, and the analysis included verbal, non‐verbal, contextual and cultural elements. The analyzed data were presented using both a selection of excerpts to explain individual instances and histograms to display some descriptive data (e.g. code frequencies). Keywords: Interaction Analysis, Mediation, Scaffolding, Other‐Regulation, Zone of Proximal Development, Comprehensible Input, Noticing