Investigation B
- Work with a colleague to write several examples like the one above, specifying the purpose, focus, method, and criteria for some language learning as part of your teaching in a particular curriculum area.
- An important part of scaffolding language is making explicit to your students the things they need to learn. Express these goals in ways that engage your students’ interest.
- Work out ways of providing support so that all students can meet the criteria for success.
- Try out what you have planned with your students.
- Observe and evaluate the students’ work.
Examples of scaffolding
- The video clip Secondary curriculum and vocabulary shows teachers carefully scaffolding aspects of vocabulary learning.
- Most of the inquiries in the topics Students working together , Focus on language , and Curriculum and language development include techniques for scaffolding various aspects of language development.
- The inquiry Scaffolding students’ writing looks at one way of scaffolding learner writers in producing texts that have specific forms.
A writing frame consists of a skeleton outline given to students to scaffold their nonfiction writing. The skeleton framework consists of different key words or phrases, according to the particular generic form. The template of starters, connectives, and sentence modifiers that constitute a writing frame gives students a structure within which they can concentrate on communicating what they want to say while it scaffolds them in the use of a particular generic form. By using the form students become increasingly familiar with it.
(Wray and Lewis, 1998, Writing frame section)
Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13 (Ministry of Education, 2004) describes Wray and Lewis’s approach to writing frames (pages 141–142) and provides models at two levels (in Appendix 9).
- Aída Walqui has developed a conceptual framework for scaffolding English-language learners . An article (Walqui, 2006) is cited in the references.
