Scaffolding 5-year-old children in Japanese kindergarten collaboratively retelling a tale

ABSTRACT

This study reports an analysis of how children in a Japanese kindergarten are scaffolded when facing the challenge of collaboratively retelling a kitsune story they have been told. What is referred to as a kitsune story is an example of a trickster tale with foxes as anthropomorphised animals. The participants were ten 5-year-old children and their teacher. Told a story by their teacher, the children were asked later to collaboratively retell it. How this retelling activity is supported – theorised in terms of the metaphor of scaffolding – is analysed on the basis of recordings. The findings show the nature of this evolving process. The conclusion is that the metaphor of scaffolding may require some contextual specification to remain a functional conceptual – and in extension, pedagogical – tool in activities fundamentally different from the activity studied in Wood, Bruner and Ross’ founding 1976 study.

KEYWORDS:

• Scaffolding
• narrating
• remembering
• understanding
• kindergarten

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Kataokadai kindergarten where the study was conducted. We also want to extend our gratitude to Kio University’s Overseas Research Programme, for funding the first author’s work, making possible this collaboration. In addition, we extend our gratitude to the members of the Sociocultural and Dialogic Studies seminar group at the University of Gothenburg, for commenting on a previous version of this manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Aiko Oshiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2710-9148

Niklas Pramling http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1089-942X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kio University’s Overseas Research Program, for funding the first author’s work, making possible this collaboration. University's Overseas Research Programme, for funding the first author's work, making possible this collaboration.