scaffolding |
Working Definition:
The structure of a temporary frame-work in which the paradigmatic axis of a discourse intersects with the syntagmatic axis at each point along the discursive sequence as the text is construed.
Disciplinary Definitions:
In his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, James Paul Gee writes:
If I had to single out a primary function of human language, it would be not one, but the following two: to scaffold the performance of social activities (whether work or both) and to scaffold human affiliation within cultures and social groups and institutions.
These two functions are connected. Cultures, social groups, and institutions shape social activities: there are no activities like "water-cooler gossip sessions" or "corridor politics" without an institution whose water cooler, social relations, corridors, and politics are the sites of and rationale for these activities. At the same time though, cultures, social groups, and institutions get produced, reproduced, and transformed through human activities. There is no institution unless it is enacted and reenacted moment-by-moment in activities like water-cooler gossip sessions, corridor politics, meetings, and numerous other sorts of social interactions, all of which partly (but only partly) have a life all of their own apart from larger cultural and institutional forces. (Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 2002, 1).
Scaffolding is not an important term in Gee's book, but it is a term that is particularly useful. In analyzing a passage from an historial text, he notes that the author deploys "the contextual scaffolding needed to frame ... his main points." In other words, the words are are foregrounded in readers' attention are framed by the previous words now in the background of the readers' attention. Gee is calling our attention to the way "language-in-use" frames "the main point" for readers. Gee is a Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is particularly sensitive to the ways readers derive meaning from readings.
I understand scaffolding in semiotic terms where there is a long-standing distinction between the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis of language. The paradigmatic axis refers to the sequence of words in a discourse. It is intersected by a paradigmatic axis which refers to the words preceding the one being read. What is remembered about the preceding discourse influences the way one reads the discourse at any point in its sequence.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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