Scaffolding learning through reflection : Finnish language students recycling, negotiating, and reinterpreting instructions in a portfolio assignment

Abstract

Students’ everyday life interactions in the wild are an important resource for their language learning, and reflection helps in utilizing the learning potential of these experiences. Students need scaffolding to benefit from reflection, and task design must support learners’ agency. These requirements suggest a need to examine and develop such reflection tasks. This paper examines a portfolio task developed by the teacher-researcher to enhance students’ learning in the wild as part of an U.S. university-level Finnish Studies program. Drawing on nexus analysis and using discourse analysis, the paper maps and analyzes how phrases from the instructions circulate to the subsequent reflections, and what the implications of this circulation are for the discourses created as well as for learning. The analysis reveals how the students recycle, negotiate, and reinterpret phrases from the original task, and how the task scaffolds the reflections. Pedagogical implications focus on how the task can be developed. The author advocates for the use of nexus analysis in teacher research to bridge research practice with task development and instructional change. As part of their training, pre-service teachers are recommended to collect and analyze student data to study the implications of the learning tasks they develop and use.