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ey construct in interactionist theories is mediation, which refers to “the part played by other significant people in the learners’ lives, who enhance their learning by selecting and shaping the learning experiences presented to them”. (Williams & Burden, 2000: 40). For Vygotsky and his followers, the means of mediation can be a system of symbols, notably language, so in language classrooms, the mediation can take the form of conversational interaction which includes teacher error correction or various other kinds of teacher assistance. Through mediation, learners are able to transform skills that lie in the zone of proximal development (ZPD, a terminology developed by Vygotsky (1978) to refer to the area of learners’ potential development). According to social interactionist theories, the functions of mediation are initially performed in collaborating with others, typically through interacting with some other person, and then are subsequently performed independently. One way in which it occurs in L2 acquisition is through instructional interaction which provides scaffolding. At one level, scaffolding serves as the means by which teacher assists learners to produce linguistic forms that lie outside their existing competence. Furthermore, it refers more broadly to the social, cognitive and affective support that interactants afford each other. Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) identify the following features of scaffolding: 1.Recruiting interest in the task 2.Simplifying the task 3.Maintaining pursuit of the goal 4.Marking critical features and discrepancies between what has been produced and the ideal solution 5.Controlling frustration during problem solving 6.Demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed. 3. Method As exploratory practice, which language teachers conduct in their own classrooms to understand the areas of language teaching and learning that they wish to explore（Allwright,1997）, the present study on supportive error-correction is conducted by the author as an English teacher in her own classroom. To provide error correction in an effective and non-threatening way, a number of theoretically grounded error-correction strategies were adopted in practice to examine whether and how the strategies used give supportive effect both in students’ affect and their language learning. The participants for this study included the author and the students in a college EFL classroom. The students were second-year non-English majors. Most of them have learned English for seven to nine years, so they were regarded as intermediate English learners. The present study mainly used audio-recording to collect the data. The College English Lesson in the author’s own class was audio-recorded for one term and the error-correction part was transcribed and analyzed. Although the students were aware of recording, I told them it was only for the purpose of my research and would not be used for judging or grading their performance in classroom, so there was no stressful influence on the classroom atmosphere or students’ performance. 4. Results and Discussion The strategies I adopted mainly serve two purposes: First, to help the students notice and correct their errors; Second, to encourage and support the students in affect. Four basic strategies were proved to be beneficial for L2 learning in my classroom: A. The “sandwich” method can create a positively affective environment for error correction “Sandwich” is a metap