The emerging interest in scaffolding as a dynamic, multifaceted, and evolving construct has
mounted over the last decades due to its impact on teachers’ professional development and
students’ learning. The present paper adopted conversation analysis to analyze scaffolding
intentions in content-based instruction (CBI) based on Van de Pol et al.’s (2010) framework
of scaffolding intentions, which includes direction maintenance, cognitive structuring,
reduction of the degrees of freedom, recruitment, and frustration control. Through
convenience sampling, four science teachers in English-medium CBI were selected, and the
videotaped recordings of 12 hours of their online classroom instruction were transcribed and
analyzed. The findings indicated that scaffolding intentions mostly pertain to enhancing
students’ cognitive structuring, controlling their frustration, and promoting their engagement
in the learning process. The findings showed that the cognitive load of learning concepts
was one of the main determiners of teachers’ scaffolding. Also, various activities to recruit
interest were used by the teachers to provide scaffolding. The findings evidenced that
teachers’ interactional and instructional techniques were mostly centered on directing
students towards the pedagogical aims and engaging them in the various activities at hand to
call students’ attention to the applicability of science matters in the real-life or personal
experience. In this study, developing self-supporting and self-reflecting strategies was found
to be demanding for the teachers. These findings have implications for the teachers and
teacher educators to heighten teachers’ awareness of scaffolding in CBI classes to enact
more effective teaching