Scaffolding Literacy Meets ESL: Some Insights from ACT Classrooms

In second language classroom contexts, enabling ESL students to access school learning is a double challenge. Teachers need to scaffold students' engagement with written language at the same time as they move them from (often diverse) first languages into English itself. Literacy pedagogies - even those most successful with native speakers of English - need adaptation if they are to meet the needs of ESL students. While the use of 'scaffolding' as a metaphor has been widely taken up in language teaching, this paper looks closely at one 'take' on scaffolding - Scaffolding Literacy (Gray and Cower, 2001). This paper seeks to describe the core components, to identify the DNA, of Scaffolding Literacy (SL) before reporting on a project where ESL teachers in ACT primary and secondary schools were introduced to the principles and practices of SL. The goal was to evaluate the pedagogy's effectiveness for ESL learners. The project found SL to be an extremely effective pedagogy in ESL teaching, but identified several important innovations on the sequence which value-add for ESL learners whilst still maintaining the essential core of the SL pedagogy. These innovations include the use of non-narrative texts, the deliberate selection of culturally inclusive texts for study, the incorporation of the linguistic and cultural resources of the students and their families, and the need to incorporate greater use of multimodal teaching strategies to supplement and support oral language in order to build understandings of the language and the context of challenging texts.