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Supporting Oral Language Development in Preschool Children Through Instructional Scaffolding During Drawing Activity: A Qualitative Case Study

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: The research on teaching scaffolding for preschool children's oral language development (OLD) has become an important topic in the academic world. However, there remains a lack of evidence-based research on the integration of scaffolding strategies integrated into creative art contexts to support children's creative expression and language production. In this study, a qualitative case study was conducted to analyze the non-participatory observation and artwork analysis of five-year-old children's drawing activities in a kindergarten in China based on socio-cultural and scaffolding theories. Three types of core scaffolding strategies were summarized. The findings reveal that the three strategies work together dynamically within the children's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): (1) the visual prompt strategy enriches the vocabulary diversity of metaphors, adjectives, and ordinal words; (2) dialogic narrative co-construction effectively improves narrative coherence across exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution; and (3) emotional engagement strategies foster a safe expressive environment, promoting the integration of affective vocabulary with intrinsic motivation. Accordingly, a three-dimensional integrated "visual-linguistic-emotional" scaffolding model was constructed, emphasizing the practical guidelines of simultaneous scaffolding and gradual scaffolding withdrawal during the warm-up, creation, and sharing sessions of the drawing activity. This study expands the application of scaffolding theory in unstructured art contexts, and provides a systematic practical framework for the design of cross-contextual language support strategies and teacher training in preschool education.

Source: Behavioral Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/bs15070908

Authors: Mengyun Xiao, Fadzilah Amzah, Noor Azlina Mohamed Khalid, Weihan Rong, Xiaolong Zhou

Institutions: Universiti Sains Malaysia, Qufu Normal University, East China Normal University

Language: English

Topic: Early Childhood Education and Development

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,654