Do you believe that construction workers feel safe while putting up a building? Do they have any support to do so? According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “scaffolding” /ˈskæf·əl·dɪŋ/ is “a temporary structure made of flat boards and metal poles used to work on a tall building.”
“But, what does all that have to do with teaching English?” – You might be asking yourself. To what I would answer: Everything!
When we are teaching and willing to have our learners communicate, the outcomes become more successful when we provide our students with enough support so that they feel safer to understand and produce language. According to Bruner (1978), scaffolding “refers to the steps taken to reduce the degrees of freedom in carrying out some task so that the child can concentrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring.”
You have probably faced situations when you ask your learners to “talk to themselves about something”, or even “use only English,” and the results were off. That is probably because it is mandatory that you make sure they are safe in order to do so as well as that they have fully understood what the task is.
When scaffolding input, i.e., facilitating learners understanding of the language, the use of visuals such as picture cards, illustration from a page of a book, realia, body language or visual organizers (word web, for instance) will certainly help learners get the message across.
As for promoting learners output, some of the strategies recommended are to use sentence starters (e.g., I have never…) or sentences frames (e.g., I’d rather ____ because ____), to demonstrate and/or to provide model prior to the task, to break tasks down, to count on learners previous knowledge and to circulate around the classroom asking learners questions.
Remember to consider that, even though you are teaching a group of learners, you must look at the learner in their individuality. The level of language to be used with and expected from each learner will certainly vary. This support is to be provided temporarily, so that learners can, for instance, understand a new concept or perform a given task in English. So, keep in mind that, once the learner is familiar with this given vocabulary or structure, proved by confident and fluent use of such, the support can – and should – move to higher levels.
With all that being considered, when trying to get learners to build language, remember: scaffolding is an effective strategy you can use in order to achieve more successful outcomes from learners.
Have you used these or any other scaffolding strategies in your lessons? How was the experience?
Reference
Bruner, J. (1978). The role of dialogue in language acquisition. In A. Sinclair, R. Jarvella & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), The child’s conception of language. New York: Springer-Verlag.
