Contextualization and Scaffolding in Professional Vocabulary Development: Toward a Pedagogical Framework for Tertiary Language Education

Abstract

Structural change in higher professional education demands a rethink of specialized foreign language instruction in economics, marketing, and analytics, where graduates must navigate hybrid communicative spaces blending data reporting, marketing concepts, and macroeconomic frameworks. This paper examines the challenges of acquiring professional vocabulary, focusing on semantic drift: how polysemous terms (elasticity, conversion, yield, pipeline) shift meaning across domains.

Drawing on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Bruner's scaffolding theory, and Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study proposes an integrated linguo-pedagogical matrix mapping three levels of contextualization (micro-textual, meso-situational, macro-discursive) onto corresponding scaffolding types (hard, soft, procedural). The resulting three-tiered model shows how structured support reduces cognitive load, resolves interference between competing domain meanings, and guides learners toward independent, discourse-level mastery.