This paper aims at explaining the concept of scaffolding within ZPD, providing in-depth analysis, and illustrating how scaffolding, as a tool of assistance, can be used in the teaching of writing. Scaffolding, as a concept, has been originated from Vygotsky’s theoretical notion- the zone of proximal development (ZPD). As it is known, ZPD has been originally constructed to account for the gap between the actual level and the potential level of development of the individual learners. Briefly, the first part of the paper showed how the notions of ZPD, internalization and the concepts of activated learning and collaborative writing within ZPD were briefly presented in the literature review. Likewise, the second part of discussed important concepts in the literature such as scaffolding, principles of scaffolding, scaffolded writing, scaffolding learning. In the third part of this paper, different studies of scaffolding and the teaching of writing in the EFL contexts were briefly discussed and critically presented. The last part of the study briefly presented and discussed the findings of a short one-month case study of my five-year-old son.

Generally speaking, the current paper demonstrates a detailed and critical exploration of Arabic pragmatic markers (PMs) in spoken discourse. Although there seems to be less agreement on the topic of the particular phenomena that the current study is addressing, my study will use the term PM instead of discourse marker (DM). For clarity, it should be identified that a PMs in this study is “most commonly used as a general or umbrella term covering forms with a wide variety of functions both on the interpersonal and textual levels” (Zienkowski, Östman, & Verschueren, 2011, p. 227); therefore, DMs or any other linguistic elements with discourse functions are considered as a subtype of a PM (see Fraser, 2009; Aijmer,2013). Based on the literature review, treating the phenomena as PMs will provide us with a more comprehensive approach towards the study of that particular phenomena in Arabic dialects; such an approach does not only focus on texts, but also incorporates social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of the contexts into our analysis of the phenomena. Briefly, the structure of this paper will be divided into the following sections: a definition of pragmatic markers, theoretical approaches of PMs, PMs in the Arabic literature, variations in Arabic, a variational pragmatic approach and PMs, treatment of PMs in Arabic literature, PMs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), PMs in Dialectal Arabic, and conclusion.

Based on the literature review, the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) in the conversations of the native English speakers are generally regarded as results of the normal speaking between people. On the other hand, the same patterns in the conversations of the L2 speakers are always seen as a marker of disfluency and linguistic disabilities of the nonnative speakers. Therefore, this study simply focuses on finding how the three disfluency patterns are used by the Saudi English speakers from different levels of fluency. The sampling of the study includes two groups of participants from different fluency levels. Through the transcriptions and the discourse analysis of one hour recoding of the two groups, the results showed that the three patterns (fillers, repairs and repetitions) should not be generally associated with disfluency. Instead, repetitions and self-repairs have been equally used by the two groups and such patterns can be used as a conversational device. However, the filler “uh” with longer pausing can clearly predict disfluency among the Saudi English speakers.