SCQFFOLDinG

LanGuaGe,
SCQFFOLDinG
leaRninG
Teaching Second Language Learners
in the Mainstream Classroom

pauune GiBBons
Foreword by Jim Cummins
Heinemann
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Offices and agents throughout the world

© 2002 by Pauline Gibbons

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec¬
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gibbons, Pauline, 1946-
Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning : teaching second language learners in
the mainstream classroom / Pauline Gibbons ; foreword by Jim Cummins,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-325-00366-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. 2. Interdisciplinary
approach in education. 3. Second language acquisition. 4. Language and education.
I. Title.
PE1128.A2 G48 2002
428'.0071—dc21 2001007440

Editor: Danny Miller

Production: Vicki Kasabian
Cover design: Jenny Jensen Greenleaf
Typesetter: Argosy
Manufacturing: Steve Bernier/Jamie Carter

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

05 04 03 02 VP 3 4 5 6
 Contents

Foreword by Jim Cummins v

Acknowledgments ix

1 Scaffolding Language and Learning 1

2 Classroom Talk: Creating Contexts for Language Learning 14

3 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom 40

4 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum:

An Integrated Approach 51

5 Reading in a Second Language 77

6 Listening: An Active and Thinking Process 102

7 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About

Language: Developing an Integrated Curriculum 118

Glossary of Teaching Activities 141

Bibliography 153

Index 159
 Foreword

Rarely has education been so high on the agenda of policy makers and politicians
around the world as during the past fifteen years. Many countries that formerly oper¬
ated a relatively decentralized school system with considerable local autonomy to
achieve curriculum goals have now “tightened up” and imposed, as a condition of
funding, standards that must be achieved and instructional methods that must be fol¬
lowed. Attainment of these standards is increasingly monitored by means of high-
stakes standardized tests, with rewards and punishments meted out to schools and
educators on the basis of students’ performance. Predictably the jargon has prolifer¬
ated: in addition to standards, we have performance indicators, benchmarks, outcomes -

based education, quality assurance, attainment targets, minimal competency testing,

accountability, and so forth. Intense debate has occurred not only about the conse¬
quences of high-stakes testing (e.g., the dangers of teaching to the test) but also about
topics such as appropriate methods for teaching reading and the efficacy or otherwise
of bilingual education as a means of promoting achievement among English language
learners (ELL).
The standards-based reform movement has been fueled by parallel developments
in many countries. The common context is one where educational systems are
attempting to redefine themselves in light of rapidly changing economic, technologi¬
cal, and social conditions that are affecting countries around the world. The shift from
an industrialized to a knowledge-based economy has highlighted the need for workers
with higher levels of literacy and numeracy than was previously the case.
Complicating the process of top-down reform has been the rapid escalation of lin¬
guistic and cultural diversity in many countries. Imposition of a one-size-fits-all standard
in curriculum content areas becomes highly problematic in a context where a significant
number of students (e.g., at least 25 percent in states such as California) are in the
process of acquiring basic knowledge of the language of instruction. As Pauline Gibbons
notes, the research is very clear that ELL students require considerably more time to
catch up to grade expectations in the academic registers of English as compared to the
conversational registers (typically at least five years as compared to less than two years).
Too often students are left to fend for themselves after they have attained basic conver¬
sational fluency, and many continue to experience academic difficulty.
Lortunately, in this book Pauline Gibbons has given us clear directions and
classroom-tested strategies for supporting students’ academic progress beyond the ini¬
tial stages of acquiring English. We see how the teaching of language can be integrated

v
 Foreword

seamlessly with the teaching of content and how academic achievement can be
boosted without sacrificing our own vision of education to the dictates of knee-jerk
accountability.
A standardized test may provide some perspective on the present level of aca¬
demic functioning of a particular student or school (even this is hotly debated). How¬
ever, it is clearly illegitimate logically and meaningless from a policy perspective to
make inferences regarding student progress or quality of instruction on the basis of
comparisons between schools whose student composition varies enormously—for
example, suburban schools whose students are predominantly native English-speakers
and inner-city schools whose students are predominantly learners of English. A typical
student who has been learning English for only one or two years will inevitably perform
more poorly on standardized tests than one whose native language is English. This pat¬
tern of test performance says nothing about the quality of instruction that each stu¬
dent has received. However, the awkward presence of ELL students has not been
permitted to slow down the accountability juggernaut in North America or elsewhere.
In contrast to many of the politicians, teachers of ELL students see very clearly
that high-stakes testing can give a highly misleading picture of both student progress
and the quality of instruction in schools that have significant numbers of ELL students.
Yet teachers frequently have to function in contexts where their voices regarding the
needs of their students are ignored. In some school districts, the educational response
to linguistic diversity has been to insist on teaching even more intensively to the test.
Skills-oriented transmission approaches to instruction have submerged the fragile
rhetoric of the need for higher-order thinking and critical literacy. In some inner-city
districts, “teacher-proof” scripted phonics programs that reduce teachers’ instructional
role simply to parroting the one-size-fits-all script have been presented as a quick fix
to boosting students’ reading and overall academic progress.
What are the consequences for students and teachers of the regime of top-down
standards and high-stakes standardized testing? What is left out of students’ educa¬
tional experience that as a society we might consider valuable? What types of class¬
room interactions that we previously considered central to developing ELL students’
academic language will now be dumped in the “off-task” trash bin? What is the image
of the teacher as educator, and student as learner, implied by this approach?
Clearly, these new realities reflect a profound distrust of teachers and an extremely
narrow interpretation of the teaching-learning process. Nowhere in this anemic
instructional vision is there room for really connecting at a human level with cultur¬
ally diverse students; consigned to irrelevance also is any notion of affirming students’
identities by activating what they already know about the world and mobilizing the
intellectual and linguistic tools they use to make sense of their worlds. Test-driven cur¬
ricula reduce instruction to a technical exercise. No role is envisaged for teachers or
students to invest their identities (affect, intellect, and imagination) collaboratively in
the teaching-learning process.

vi
 Foreword

Within this context of simplistic technocratic attempts to solve educational prob¬

lems, Pauline Gibbons book emerges as an eloquent reaffirmation of the central role
that teachers play in creating classroom contexts that foster their students’ academic,
linguistic, and personal growth. In lucid prose, she demystifies what is involved in pro¬
moting conversational and academic language proficiency among ELL students and
gives us a sense of how exciting and personally rewarding this challenge can be for both
teachers and students. In contrast to prescriptions to teach skills and content as part
of a one-way transmission process, teaching and learning are conceived as an inte¬
grated social process. Teachers and students are active participants in this process, and
learning is seen as a collaborative endeavor. Skills, content knowledge, and student
identities emerge and become shaped in the flow of teacher-student interaction.
As the title of the book indicates, scaffolding is a central notion in the teaching-
learning framework that Pauline Gibbons articulates. Drawing on theoretical con¬
structs advanced by Lev Vygotsky in relation to the nature of learning and by Michael
Halliday regarding registers of language, she highlights how teachers and students
work together, through their classroom interaction, to develop new skills, concepts,
and levels of understanding. This support, or scaffolding, enables children to perform
tasks independently that previously they could perform only with the assistance or
guidance of the teacher. Rich examples of classroom discourse throughout the book
illustrate exactly how this scaffolding process works and how much it draws on teach¬
ers’ intuition, sensitivity, and feeling for language. Lormulaic it is not, unlike the
“teacher-proof” scripts that are increasingly being foisted on teachers and students in
inner-city schools.
Throughout the book there is an emphasis on providing explicit information to
students about the nature of particular linguistic genres and the “rules of the game”
that operate with different text types. It is equally important to demystify in an explicit
way concepts and semantic relationships that operate in particular content areas.
However, this explicitness is part of a process whereby knowledge is co-constructed
between teachers and students. Task-focused student talk and writing—collaborative
use of language—is the medium through which students’ knowledge of the world and
knowledge about language emerges.
Within the pedagogy articulated in this volume, ELL students are constructed as
active seekers after meaning who are capable of motivated inquiry, insight, and intel¬
ligence. Teachers are similarly constructed as professionals capable of making creative
links between theory and practice and between practice and theory. The respect for
teachers and students that is communicated on every page of this book is a far cry from
current trends that conceive of education as a form of “service delivery” to be evalu¬
ated by standardized tests on the basis of its “productivity.”
I hope that this book is read widely by “mainstream” classroom teachers as well as
by those directly involved in English language teaching to ELL students. Increasingly,
this mainstream classroom is populated by students from around the globe who bring

vii
 Foreword

to the classroom diverse and rich experiences together with specific learning needs. It
is no longer enough to see ourselves as competent and committed teachers in a generic
sense. The “generic” student is no longer white, middle-class, monolingual, and
monocultural. Instead, students in our classrooms come from many different national
and cultural backgrounds, speak and understand a good sample of the languages of the
world, and require specific kinds of instruction to enable them to reach their full
potential as human beings.
This book is a great place to start in exploring the kinds of instruction that will fully
promote ELL students’ linguistic and academic potential. Not only is it concise, acces¬
sible, and eminently practical, but more fundamentally, it communicates an exuberance
about education while reaffirming teachers’ commitment to nurture the intellectual and
linguistic resources that students bring to the classroom, and from there to our societies.
It articulates a clear and unpretentious sense of what education is all about, one that is
focused on harnessing children’s power to use language as the primary tool for intellec¬
tual and academic development. The interpersonal and collaborative spaces created in
the classroom between teachers and students by these powerful uses of language are
much closer to our intuitive sense of what education ought to be than the constricted
focus that dominates so many current policy discussions.
The difficult times in which we live demand that our classrooms nurture thinking
and creative problem-solving abilities as well as sensitivity to the perspectives of those
from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Only in these kinds of instructional
spaces will language, learning, and academic abilities truly develop. Only in classroom
contexts where ELL students’ brainpower is fully acknowledged and activated will they
catch up rapidly to their peers in academic performance. The theory and practice
described so clearly by Pauline Gibbons in this volume highlight how to create these
spaces in our own classrooms for all of our students.

Jim Cummins
The University of Toronto
 Acknowledgments

The ideas presented in this book have evolved over many years. I owe a significant
debt to the hundreds of teachers with whom I have worked during that time; I have
learned much from their practices and been challenged by their questions.
Thanks are also due to my wonderful colleagues at the University of Technology,
Sydney, for their feedback, encouragement, and friendship.
I would also like to thank my son Mark. I appreciate his special brand of humor
and his cartoons have enlivened the pages of this book.
I would like especially to express my appreciation and thanks to Danny Miller,
whose editorial guidance, encouraging comments, and enthusiasm for the book have
made the writing of it a pleasure.
Finally, my thanks to Jim Cummins, whose work with minority children has been
an inspiration and has long influenced my own work, for writing the foreword, and for
the initial suggestion that I write this book.

tx
.
 1
Scaffolding Language and Learning

I can say what I want, but not for school work and
strangers. ” English language learner quoted in
McKay, Davies, Devlin, Clayton, Oliver, and Zaun
mit, The Bilingual Interface Project Report

ESL Students in the Mainstream Classroom

The comment in the epigraph was made by an eleven-year-old girl for whom English
was a second language. She had been asked, “How good do you think your English is?”
Her response suggests that while she feels able to communicate in general terms, she
is less confident when it comes to using English at school, or with people with whom
she is not on familiar terms. This may not seem surprising—it requires more linguistic
skills to use language for academic purposes than it does to use it in everyday conver-
sation. Similarly, if we are using a second language, it is often easier to talk to people
we know well and with whom we are at ease than to converse more formally with a
stranger. What is more surprising about this comment is that this student—let’s call
her .Julianna—was born in Australia and has been exposed to English throughout her
primary education. She began school at age five, as fluent as any other five'year-old in
her mother tongue but speaking little English. Now, six years later, she feels that her
English is still inadequate for certain purposes.
Why should this he? Surely, it could be argued, six years is sufficient time to learn
a new language, given the fact that Julianna has been living in an English-speaking
country and attending an English-medium school. Like many second language learn¬
ers, she also appears to her teachers to speak English as fluently as her English-
speaking peers. But Julianna is not unusual: many second language learners seem able
to cope with English at school, yet have academic or literacy-related difficulties in
class. To understand why this might be, we need to think about the nature of language,
and in particular how it varies according to the context in which it is used.

1
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Language and Context

The theory of language on which this book draws is based on the work of Michael Hah
liday and other linguists working within systemic functional linguistics. These linguists
argue that language is involved in almost everything we do, and whenever we use Ian-
guage there is a context, or to be more precise, two kinds of context. There is, first, a
context of culture: speakers within a culture share particular assumptions and expecta¬
tions, so that they are able to take for granted the ways in which things are done.
Knowing how to greet someone, how to order a meal in a restaurant, how to partici¬
pate in a class, or how to write a business letter are examples of this kind of cultural
knowledge. While cultures may share many common purposes for using language, how
these things actually get done varies from culture to culture.
A second kind of context is the context of situation, the particular occasion on
which the language is being used. One of the most fundamental features of language
is that it varies according to the context of situation. This context is characterized by three
features: (1) what is being talked (or written) about; (2) the relationship between the
speakers (or writer and reader); and (3) whether the language is spoken or written.
How we use language is determined largely by these contextual features. Think, for
example, of the differences between a conversation about teaching and one about
cooking, or between a social studies text and a biology text. Imagine yourself chatting
to a friend at a party and compare that with how you might respond to questions at a
job interview. Or think about how differently language might be used during a com¬
puter demonstration compared to the way the same information might be written in a
computer manual.
Halliday and Hasan (1985) refer to these contextual factors as field, tenor, and
mode. Thus:

• Field refers to the topic of the text.

• Tenor refers to the relationship between speaker and listener (or writer and
reader).
• Mode refers to the channel of communication.

Together these three variables constitute what is referred to as the register of a text. As
children learn their first language, they gradually learn to vary the language they use
according to the context they are in. In other words, they learn to vary the register of
the language so that it is appropriate for the context.
The ability to handle register is a developmental process for children learning their
first language. One of the first things a young child learns to do is to talk about the
“here and now”—to refer to the objects and goings-on in their immediate environ¬
ment. Here-and-now language occurs in contexts where both speakers can see each
other, and where there are visual clues, gestures, and facial expressions to help com¬
munication. Often what is being talked about is embedded in the visual context, such

2
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

as Put it there. If we are not present we don’t know what it and there refer to. Simi-
larly, if we are speaking on the phone, we have to express this differently, with more
details: Put the television in the corner.” But the words it and there would be perfectly
understandable to speakers who could see what was being referred to.
As children get older, they gradually become able to use language in a more
explicit or abstract way to refer to things that aren’t in their immediate surroundings,
such as to tell someone about what happened at kindergarten that day. They may not
always be successful at first. If you talk with very young children, you’ll notice that they
do not always provide enough information for you to understand them if you did not
share the experience they are referring to, and you are left wondering what exactly
they are trying to tell you. Halliday (1993) refers to this as the ability to “impart mean-
ings which are not already known” (102). He writes:

When children are first using language to annotate and classify experience, the par-
ticular experience that is being construed in any utterance is one that the addressee is
known to have shared. When the child says green bus, the context is “that’s a green
bus; you saw it too.” . . . What the child cannot do at this stage is to impart the expe¬
rience to someone who has not shared it. [At a later stage] children learn to tell peo¬
ple things they do not already know. (102)

Making Meaning Explicit

Martin (1984) suggests that “the more speakers are doing things together and engag¬
ing in dialogue, the more they can take for granted. As language moves away from the
events it describes, and the possibility of feedback is removed, more and more of the
meanings must be made explicit in the text” (27). Here, the term text refers to a piece
of complete meaningful language, both spoken and written. In other words, the lan¬
guage itself must contain more information because it cannot depend on the addressee
knowing exactly what occurred. Consider the differences between these four texts:

• Look, it’s making them move. Those didn’t stick.

• We found out the pins stuck on the magnet.
• Our experiment showed that magnets attract some metals.
• Magnetic attraction occurs only between ferrous metals.

Here we can see how the register of each text changes because the context in which it
was produced is different: each text is more explicit than the one that precedes it. Text
1 was spoken by a child talking in a small group as they were experimenting with a mag¬
net to find out which objects it attracted. Without knowing this, it’s hard to work out
what’s being talked about—we don’t know what them and those are referring to, and the
words move and stick could occur in a number of different contexts. Text 1 demonstrates
how dependent “here-and-now” language is on the immediate situational context. Text

3
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

2 is the same child telling the teacher what she had learned, and is in the form of a
recount in which the pms and the magnet refer to specific objects. These words make
the text more explicit and therefore easier to understand. Text 3 is from her written
report and contains a generalization: magnets attract some metals. The text is starting to
sound more scientific. For example, stick is replaced by attract. Text 4, by way of com¬
parison, is from a child’s encyclopedia. The language is much denser, and the process
to which the child was referring in Texts 1, 2, and 3 is now summarized in the notion
of magnetic attraction.
While the field of all four texts is the same (i.e., they are on the same topic), there
are considerable differences in the way in which the language is used. As they begin to
refer to events not shared by listeners or readers, the vocabulary becomes more tech¬
nical and subject or field specific; the tenor of the texts becomes more impersonal
(notice how the personal reference to we and our disappear), and the mode varies (they
become increasingly more explicit and more like written language). Of course, we
could continue this continuum; imagine, for example, how magnetism might be writ¬
ten about in a university book on physics. In many ways, this set of texts reflects the
process of formal education: as children move through school, they are expected to
progress from talking only about their here-and-now personal experiences toward
using the particular registers of different curriculum areas, and expressing increasingly
more abstract ideas.
The four texts demonstrate how it is problematic to talk about overall “profi¬
ciency” in a language without taking into account the context in which the language
will be used. As Baynham (1993) suggests, language learning is not a simple linear
process but a “functional diversification, an extension of a learner’s communicative
range” (5). Even a fluent mother-tongue speaker of English will not be proficient in
every possible context: for example, there will always be some subjects that they know
very little about and so can’t talk about. Or perhaps there is a particular form of writ¬
ing, such as a Ph.D. proposal, that even highly educated people might not be familiar
with and would need guidance in producing. So it is not simply a matter of getting the
basic “grammar” correct, but of knowing the most appropriate language to use in the
context.

Learning New Registers

So what has all this to do with Julianna, the student quoted at the beginning of the
chapter? It is obvious that a second language learner is likely to have far fewer diffi¬
culties in producing something like Text 1, where the visual context provides a support
for meaning making, and where fewer linguistic resources are required, than with sub¬
sequent texts that require increasingly more control over grammar and vocabulary.
Cummins (1996, 2000) uses the terms context'embedded and context'reduced to refer to
the distinction between the registers of everyday language and the more academic reg¬
isters of school, and has suggested that whereas a second language learner is likely to
develop conversational language quite rapidly—usually taking between one and two

4
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

years the registers associated with academic learning take between five and seven
years for the learner to develop at a level equivalent to a competent native speaker of
the same age (see also Collier 1989; McKay et al. 1997). These schoobrelated regis¬
ters, as the text example shows, tend to be more like written language, more abstract
and less personal, and contain more subject-specific language. Julianna’s comment
implies she still has difficulties with this more academic language, even though she has
no difficulty in expressing herself in more everyday contexts.
This model of language development should not suggest a negative or deficit view
of learners like Julianna or of their English skills. Nor should it suggest that the devel¬
opment of school-related language is simply a matter of time and that it will be “picked
up eventually. On the contrary, viewing language development as a process of learn¬
ing to control an increasing range of registers suggests that while all children are pre¬
disposed in a biological sense to learn language, whether or not they actually do, how
well they learn to control it, and the range of registers and purposes for which they are
able to use it are a matter of the social contexts in which they find themselves.
Second language learners will have experienced a wide range of contexts in which
they have learned to use their mother tongue, but a much more restricted range of
contexts in English. If none of these children’s previous language experience is taken
into account when the children start school, and if they are expected not only to learn
a second language but to learn in it as well, it is hardly surprising that without focused
English language support they may start to fall behind their peers who are operating in
a language they have been familiar with since birth.
While the language and literacy-related demands of the curriculum—the registers
of school—are unfamiliar to a greater or lesser extent to all children when they start
school, English-speaking children are learning these new concepts and new registers
through the medium of their mother tongue, and building on the foundations of their
first language, whereas second language learners in an English-medium school are not.
Children who are learning through the medium of their first language, and who come
to school having already acquired the core grammar of this language and the ability to
use it in a range of familiar social situations, have a head start in learning to use the
academic registers of school. And as Cummins (1996, 2000) points out, these English-
speaking peers do not stand still in their learning and wait for ESL students to “catch
up” in the language of instruction. At the same time, we cannot put ESL students’ aca¬
demic development on hold while they are learning the language of instruction. Ulti¬
mately, if second language learners are not to be disadvantaged in their long-term
learning, and are to have the time and opportunity to learn the subject-specific regis¬
ters of school, they need access to an ongoing language-focused program across the
whole curriculum.

Integrating Language and Content

In countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia,
there are increasing numbers of ESL students in school. In the United States, for

5
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

example, more than 90 percent of recent immigrants come from non-English-speaking

countries, and according to the National Center for Education Statistics (1996), there
has been a 20 percent increase in the numbers of children who have difficulty with
English. Most second language learners spend most of their time in school in main-
stream classrooms, even when they receive some English language support from spe¬
cialist ESL teachers. However, in many countries, this support is rarely available after
the learner is past the initial stages of language learning, and the regular classroom
teacher must then carry the dual responsibility for the students’ subject learning and
for their ongoing language development.
Merely exposing ESL learners to content classrooms, however, is not an adequate
response: placing students in the mainstream classroom “cannot be assumed to provide
optimal language learning opportunities as a matter of course” (Mohan 2001, 108).
Teaching programs in all curriculum areas must therefore aim to integrate “language
and “content,” so that a second language is developed hand in hand with new cur¬
riculum knowledge. This is not a straightforward task. The integration of language,
subject content, and thinking skills requires systematic planning and monitoring. And
many teachers—and you may be one—have never had the opportunity to complete a
specialized ESL program or to prepare for this kind of teaching. This book suggests
some of the ways that teachers can respond to the learning and language needs of stu¬
dents learning though their second language, within the context of the regular school
curriculum.

A Social View of Teaching and Learning

Two Views of Learning

Since public education began, there have been two major and competing ideologies
about the goals of education and the means by which it is to be accomplished (Wells
1999, 2000). The first of these can be described as the “empty vessel” model of teach¬
ing and learning, or what Freire (1983) referred to as the “banking” model. Teachers
are seen to “deposit” skills or knowledge in the empty memory banks of their students.
The teaching-learning relationship is one of transmission and reception—transmission
of a body of knowledge by the teacher, and the reception of this knowledge by the stu¬
dents. Language, if it is thought about at all, is seen simply as a conduit or carrier of
knowledge.
The second ideology, often referred to as “progressive,” appears at one level to be
very different. In opposition to the ideology of transmission, the learner is placed at the
center of the educational process. Based on the work of Dewey and more recently, Piaget,
education is seen not as a matter of receiving information but of intelligent inquiry and
thought. In the way that this has been interpreted in some classrooms, the major organ¬
izing principle is seen to be the individual child’s active construction of knowledge, with
the teacher’s role being to stage-manage appropriate learning experiences. In this model

6
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

of learning, action is primary^ and a child’s language abilities are seen as largely the
result of more general and cognitive abilities.
Both orientations have been critiqued from the standpoint of minority students
and second language learners (Cummins 1996, 2000). Transmission models tend to
work against what is generally accepted as one of the central principles of language
learning: namely that using the language in interaction with others is an essential
process by which it is learned (see Painter 1985 on mother-tongue development and
Swain 1995 on second language development). Transmission pedagogies are also crit¬
icized as presenting a curriculum sited solely within the dominant culture, providing
little or no opportunity for minority students to express their particular experiences
and non-mainstream view of the world. Unfortunately, transmission-based approaches
have tended to dominate the education of so-called disadvantaged students, and many
compensatory programs have tended to focus on drilling students in low-level language
and numeracy skills, effectively structuring ongoing disadvantage into the curriculum
of the school (Oakes 1985). Much progressive pedagogy has also been criticized, in
particular for its lack of explicit language teaching, which, it has been argued, places a
disadvantage on those who are least familiar with the language and assumptions of a
middle-class school curriculum (Delpit 1988; Martin 1989; Kalantzis, Cope, Noble,
and Poynting 1991). In relation to the teaching of writing, such approaches have been
criticized in particular for their focus on the processes of language learning, at the
expense of focusing sufficiently on the production of written texts. Ultimately, it is
argued, the broader social realities of life beyond school require that students will need
to be able to control the language that will allow them to participate in the dominant
society. This is a powerful argument and is taken up again in Chapter 4.
In reality, both transmission and progressive orientations exist in schools, some¬
times together in the same classroom. This is not to be critical of teachers. Rather, it
points to the inadequacy of the most common models of learning within which teach¬
ers are expected to work. In fact, though very different in the way that they view learn¬
ing and the role of the teacher, both ideologies have what is essentially an
individualistic notion of learning. Whether you view the learner as an empty vessel
waiting to be filled with appropriate knowledge, or as an unfolding intellect that will
eventually reach its potential given the right environment, both views see the learner
as independent and self-contained, and learning as occurring within an individual. This
book suggests an alternative model, one that foregrounds the collaborative nature of
learning and language development between individuals, the interrelatedness of the
roles of teacher and learner, and the active roles of both in the learning process.

Learning Through Collaboration

The theory of learning on which this book draws is based on the work of Lev Vygotsky
(1978, 1986), a Russian psychologist who lived at the beginning of the twentieth cen¬
tury but whose work was not widely translated until the 1960s. Since the 1980s, his
work has begun to exert a major influence on Western education in Western Europe,

7
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

America, and Australia. Together with the work of other Soviet cognitive researchers
including Luria, Leont’ev, and the literary theorist Bakhtin—and interpretations of
this work by scholars and educationists such as Wertsch, Mercer, and Wells, Vygotsky’s
perspective on human development and learning, broadly termed socio-cultural or
socio-historical, offers a radically different perspective from that offered by dominant
Western psychological theories. Socio-cultural theory sees human development as
intrinsically social rather than individualistic. An individual’s development is thus to
a significant extent a product, not a prerequisite, of education—the result of his or her
social, historical, and cultural experiences. Thus, as suggested earlier in this chapter,
while we are all biologically able to acquire language, what language we learn, how
adept we are at using it, and the purposes for which we are able to use it are a matter
of the social contexts and situations we have been in: in a very real sense, what and
how we learn depends very much on the company we keep.
The educational basis for a child’s development is encapsulated in what Vygotsky
terms the zone of proximal development, by which he refers to the distance or the cog¬
nitive gap between what a child can do unaided and what the child can do jointly and
in coordination with a more skilled expert. Anyone who has been involved with young
children is familiar with this concept. When children are learning to feed or dress them¬
selves, the adult at first has to perform the whole activity. Then the child gradually per¬
forms parts of the activity, with the parent still assisting with the more difficult parts.
Finally, the child is able to do the whole thing unaided. In other words, successful coor¬
dination with a partner—or assisted performance—leads learners to reach beyond what
they are able to achieve alone, to participate in new situations and to tackle new tasks,
or, in the case of second language learners, to learn new ways of using language.
Vygotsky sees the development of cognition itself also as the result of participation
with others in goal-directed activity. A child initially engages in joint thinking with
others through the talk that accompanies problem solving and social participation in
everyday activity. Imagine, for example, a child doing a jigsaw puzzle with a parent or
caregiver. They will probably talk about the shapes of the pieces, what piece might go
where, how to match up colors and images, and so on. Vygotsky would argue that this
external, social dialogue is gradually internalized to become a resource for individual
thinking, or what he refers to as “inner speech.” The child’s external dialogues with
others later become an inner personal resource for the development of thinking and
problem solving; eventually the child will do jigsaw puzzles without the need for exter¬
nal dialogue. The child doing the puzzle with the adult is, of course, not only learning
how to do that particular puzzle, but becoming familiar with the kind of processes to
go through for completing subsequent puzzles. The goal of this kind of learning is to go
beyond simply learning items of knowledge to being able to use that knowledge in
other contexts—in other words, to learn how to think, not simply what to think.
As pointed out earlier, second language learners are both learning a new language
and learning other things through the medium of the language. If we accept the
premise that external dialogue is a major resource for the development of thinking, and

8
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

that interaction is also integral.to language learning, then it follows that we must con'
sider veiy seriously the nature of the talk in which learners are engaged in the class-
room. (This topic is the focus of Chapters 2 and 3 but is a continuing theme throughout
the book.)

Let s now look at how these ideas might look in practical terms. Here is an example of
a father and mother talking with their son Nigel, who at the time was around fourteen
months (taken from Halliday 1975, 112). Nigel had earlier been to the zoo, and while
he was looking at a goat, it had attempted to eat a plastic lid that Nigel was holding.
The keeper had explained that he shouldn’t let the goat eat the lid because it wasn’t
good for it. As you read this dialogue, look particularly at what the parents are doing,
and the effect this has on Nigel’s language.

Nigel try eat lid

Father what tried to eat the lid?
Nigel try eat lid
Father what tried to eat the lid?
Nigel goat, man said no, goat try eat lid, man said no

Later

Nigel goat try eat lid, man said no

Mother why did the man say no?
Nigel goat shouldn’t eat lid, (shaking head) good for it
Mother the goat shouldn’t eat the lid, it’s not good for it
Nigel goat try eat lid, man said no, goat shouldn’t eat lid, (shaking head)
good for it.

Notice the kind of scaffolding that the parents provide. Nigel’s initial utterance is
far from explicit—no one who had not shared the experience with him would be able
to understand the significance of what he is saying. First it is not clear what or who
Nigel is referring to, and the father’s question what shows Nigel what information he
needs to provide. Having extended the initial three-word utterance to something sig¬
nificantly more complete, Nigel relates this more extended version to his mother, who
pushes the dialogue forward with the question why. While Nigel does not take up his
mother’s use of shouldn’t (using instead the strategy of indicating a negative by shaking
his head), he does provide the reason his mother is seeking (it’s not good for it), and by
the end of these two small conversations he has elaborated on and made more explicit
his original short utterance. Most important, what Nigel achieves—the final story he
tells—has not simply come from him and his own linguistic resources: this story is a
collaborative endeavor, and it has been jointly constructed.
This social view of teaching and learning moves us away from the often polarized
debate between teacher-centered versus student-centered learning, toward a more
unified theory of teaching-and-learning, in which both teachers and students are seen

9
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

as active participants, and learning is seen as a collaborative endeavor. In line with

these collaborative principles, the achievements of second language learners cannot be
seen as simply the result of aptitude, background, or individual motivation, hut are also
dependent on the social and linguistic frameworks within which theii learning takes
place: language learning is a socially embedded process, not simply a psychologically
driven process. Thus what teachers choose to do in classrooms, and in particular the
kinds of support they provide, is of crucial importance in the educational success of
their students. It is to the nature of this support or scaffolding that we now turn.

Scaffolding

The term scaffolding was first used by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) in their exami¬
nation of parent-child talk in the early years. It is a useful metaphor that we will use
throughout the book. Scaffolding—in its more usual sense—is a temporary structure
that is often put up in the process of constructing a building. As each bit of the new
building is finished, the scaffolding is taken down. The scaffolding is temporary, hut
essential for the successful construction of the building. Bruner (1978) describes scaf¬
folding in the metaphorical sense in which we are using it here, as “the steps taken to
reduce the degrees of freedom in carrying out some tasks so that the child can con¬
centrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring” (19). In the classroom
it portrays the “temporary, but essential, nature of the mentor’s assistance” in support¬
ing learners to carry out tasks successfully (Maybin, Mercer, and Stierer 1992, 186).
Scaffolding, however, is not simply another word for help. It is a special kind of help that
assists learners to move toward new skills, concepts, or levels of understanding. Scaf¬
folding is thus the temporary assistance by which a teacher helps a learner know how
to do something, so that the learner will later be able to complete a similar task alone.
It is future-oriented: as Vygotsky has said, what a child can do with support today, she
or he can do alone tomorrow.
It can be argued that it is only when teacher support—or scaffolding—is needed
that learning will take place, since the learner is then likely to he working within his
or her zone of proximal development; Vygotsky (1978) suggests that the only “good”
learning is learning that is ahead of actual development. While this idea does not
ignore the notion that teaching experiences should not be completely beyond the
capacity of the learner, it does challenge the notion of learner “readiness” by suggest¬
ing that it is the teacher who is largely responsible for initiating each new step of learn¬
ing, building on what a learner is currently able to do alone. It challenges teachers to
maintain high expectations of all students, but to provide adequate scaffolding for
tasks to be completed successfully. In terms of ESL students, it suggests a somewhat
different orientation to learning tasks than has often been the case in the past. Rather
than simplifying the task (and ultimately risking a reductionist curriculum), we should
instead reflect on the nature of the scaffolding that is being provided for learners to
carry out that task. As far as possible, learners need to be engaged with authentic and
cognitively challenging learning tasks; it is the nature of the support—support that is

10
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

responsive to the particular demands made on children learning through the medium
of a second language—that is critical for success.
This book offers many suggestions for scaffolding learning for second language
learners in the regular classroom. However, it is worth remembering that the presence
ot ESL children in a school, while posing a challenge for many mainstream teachers,
can also be at the same time a catalyst for the kind of language'focused curriculum
that will be of benefit to all children. As a result of poverty or social background or
nonstandard dialect, native speakers of English may also have difficulty with the spe-
cialized registers of curriculum subjects. Recognizing that the language of these sub-
jects cannot he taken for granted but has to be taught, finding stimulating and
effective ways to do so, and critically examining how language is currently being used
in one’s own classroom will assist not only second language learners but also many of
their monolinguabEnglish peers.

What This Book Is About

Cummins (2000) suggests four key areas that schools should address in order to be inclu¬
sive of minority students: (1) community and parent participation; (2) cultural and lin¬
guistic incorporation; (3) assessment; and (4) pedagogy. In a large United States study,
“School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students,” Thomas and Collier (1999) found
three key predictors of academic success to be more important than any other set of vari¬
ables, such as socioeconomic status or gender. The first predictor was English language
support through subject areas combined with support in the first language. The second
was the use of current approaches to teaching the curriculum through two languages. The
third was the socio-cultural climate of the school itself: where the school curriculum was
inclusive of ESL students and of their language and cultural background, and where the
teachers’ expectations of their students were high, ESL student achievement was high.
It is outside the scope of this book to be inclusive of all these areas. Its major focus
is on pedagogy, and the integrated teaching of English as a Second Language across the
curriculum. However, the importance of the areas identified by Cummins and by
Thomas and Collier should be noted since good English teaching alone is an insuffi¬
cient response to the teaching of minority groups. The following chapters should
therefore be read against this broader perspective.
The book takes the view that assessment is integral to pedagogy, and is a vital
source of information about students’ language-learning needs. It suggests that one of
the most important factors influencing learning is what the student already knows.
Chapter 7 focuses on language learning across the curriculum. It includes examples of
how teachers can use day-to-day teaching and learning activities to assess students’
comprehension and use of language, and how this information can feed into future
programming. In this way, assessment plays an “advocacy” role (Cummins 1996); it
informs the planning of future teaching and learning tasks and is aimed at supporting
students’ academic and linguistic development.

11
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

A further perspective is that second language development involves a continu-

ing process of meaning making. While the “formal” aspects of language grammatical
accuracy, phonics knowledge, and spelling—cannot (and should not) be ignored, the
assumption in this book is that these aspects of language learning are best focused
on in the context of authentic meaning making and curriculum learning, within a
classroom in which dialogue between learners is valued. In other words, learning
about language is most meaningful when it occurs in the context of actual language
use.
The following five chapters each focus specifically on the teaching of speaking,
writing, reading, or listening, in the context of a range of school subjects. However,
while the major focus of each chapter is on one skill in particular, the teaching activi¬
ties they discuss usually involve the integration of all four skills: speaking, listening,
reading, and writing. Thus it is not suggested that these skills should be taught dis¬
cretely: as the examples illustrate, this book favors an integrative and across-the-
curriculum approach. They have been separated in these chapters in order to allow
each to he discussed fully, and because, in the classroom, even though a particular
activity might be integrated with other skills, it is sometimes important for the teacher
to focus on only one of them. Speaking, and even more so, listening, have too often
been the poor relations to reading and writing and sometimes not received the atten¬
tion they deserve.
The next two chapters focus on the development of spoken language. Chapter
2 discusses the development of spoken language both as a tool for learning and as a
bridge into literacy. It suggests ways in which communicative approaches can be
built into the curriculum, and gives examples of the kind of talk that is likely to
enable language development. Chapter 3 focuses on teacher-student talk, and shows
how teachers can build on the continuum introduced briefly in this chapter. Chap¬
ter 4 discusses the teaching of writing. It describes the major linguistic features of a
range of writing forms common in primary schools, and suggests a teaching model by
which specific forms of writing—text types or genres—can be developed across the
curriculum. Chapter 5 focuses on the teaching of reading and includes examples of
a range of activities that help students access the meaning of the text and model
what effective readers do when they read. Chapter 6 focuses on listening and dis¬
cusses what kinds of listening demands are made on listeners in different contexts.
It also describes a range of activities aimed at improving children’s listening skills.
Chapter 7 draws together the theories and practical activities of the previous chap¬
ters. It illustrates how the regular curriculum can he exploited for the purposes of
language teaching, and how an ESL-aware content curriculum can be related both
to the identified language needs of the students and to the language demands of the
subject area. The final section of the book is a glossary of all the teaching and learn¬
ing activities mentioned in earlier chapters. It describes and gives extra information
about how to use them. Activities that are described in the glossary are written in
bold type in the text.

12
 Scaffolding Language and Learning

In Summary

This chapter has introduced the notion of language in context: language varies accord-
ing to the contexts in which it occurs. Drawing on the work of Halliday, we have
argued that language learning is therefore not a linear process, but involves learners in
developing language in an increasing range of contexts. For ESL students, this requires
English language support across the whole curriculum. We have also suggested that
learning is essentially collaborative and social, and that both teacher and students are
partners in this collaborative learning. For the teacher, this means building on what
students already know, and providing scaffolding that is responsive to the needs of ESL
students for the language and tasks they are not yet able to do alone.
Second language learners are not a homogenous group, but are as varied in terms
of their background, experiences, language, expectations, values, culture, and socio¬
economic status as any other group of students. More important, they can no longer
be thought of as a group apart from the mainstream—in today’s culturally and lin¬
guistically diverse classrooms, they are the mainstream. As Clegg (1996) points out:

We should see ESL learners as full members of the school community, who have spe¬
cific learning needs, rather than as a separate group who must prove themselves lin¬
guistically before they can claim their full entitlement. (5)

The following chapters illustrate how subject learning can also be language learning,
and suggest some of the ways in which teachers can scaffold learning and language so
that ESL learners are seen “as full members of the school community.”

Suggestions for Further Reading

CUMMINS, J. 1996. “The Deep Structure of Educational Reform.” Chapter 6 in Negotiating
Identities: Education for Empowerment in a Diverse Society, ed. J. Cummins. Ontario, CA:
California Association for Bilingual Education.

CUMMINS, J. 2000. “Language Proficiency in Academic Contexts.” Chapter 3 in Language,

Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire, ed. J. Cummins. Clevedon, UK:
Multilingual Matters.

Delpit, L. 1988. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s
Children.” Harvard Educational Review 58 (3): 280-98.

Mercer, N. 1994. “Neo-Vygotskian Theory and Classroom Education.” In Language, Literacy

and Learning in Educational Practice, ed. B. Stierer and J. Maybin. Clevedon, UK: Multi¬
lingual Matters.
Mohan, B. 2001. “The Second Language as a Medium of Learning.” In English as a Second
Language in the Mainstream: Teaching, Learning and Identity, ed. B. Mohan, C. Leung, and
C. Davison. London: Longman.

13
 2
Classroom Talk
Creating Contexts for Language Learning

Language is our cultural tool—we use it to share expe¬

rience and so to collectively, jointly, make sense of it. . .
Language is therefore not just a means by which indi¬
viduals can formulate ideas and communicate them, it
is also a means for people to think and learn together.
Neil Mercer, The Guided Construction of Knowledge

The Role of Talk in Learning

In this chapter and the next we will explore one of the most fundamental things that
goes on in all classrooms—talk. In most classrooms, it is probably true to say that
someone is talking for most of the time; time spent on talking probably accounts for
the bulk of time students and teachers spend in school. But compared to the research
that has gone on about the teaching of reading and writing, and the time that has been
put into literacy programs, curriculum development, and syllabus design, talk must be
seen as very much the poor relation to the teaching of the written mode. Yet, as we
discussed in Chapter 1, the development of the spoken forms of language are essential
for second language learners as a bridge to the more academic language associated
with learning in school, and with the development of literacy.
Vygotskian theory also points to the significance of interaction in learning and, as
we saw in Chapter 1, views dialogue as constructing the resources for thinking. The qual¬
ity of the dialogues that children are engaged in must therefore be looked at critically.
They need to stimulate “thinking aloud,” or what Wegerif and Mercer (1996) refer to as
“exploratory talk.” This is the kind of talk that allows learners to explore and clarify con¬
cepts or to try out a line of thought, through questioning, hypothesizing, making logical
deductions, and responding to others’ ideas. But at the same time, classroom tasks must
also provide the conditions that will foster second language development.
In this chapter, we first discuss how children engaged in collaborative group work
learn language and learn through language, and discuss some of the principles for
setting up successful group tasks. Later we look at how a teacher working with a whole

14
 Classroom Talk

class can also, through his or her interactions with students, provide opportunities for
language development and learning.
We have already seen in Chapter 1 the important role interaction plays in the
process ot children learning their first language. The importance of talk more gener-
ally in learning has long been recognized (see for example Barnes 1976; Bruner 1978).
More recently, largely influenced by the work of Vygotsky, the social and cultural basis
for learning has been recognized (Mercer 1995, 2000; Wells 2000). As we have seen,
this perspective puts interaction at the heart of the learning process. The classroom is
viewed as a place where understanding and knowledge are jointly constructed between
teachers and students, and where learners are guided or “apprenticed” into the broader
understandings and language of the curriculum and the particular subject discipline.
The notion of apprenticeship into a culture is particularly relevant in an ESL school
context, where, in order to participate in society, students must learn to control the
dominant genres and ways of thinking through which that culture is constructed (Deb
pit 1988; Kalantzis, Cope, Noble, and Poynting 1991).
Research that has come out of second language acquisition studies also suggests
that interaction is a significant factor in language development (see, for example, Ellis
1994; Swain 1995; van Lier 1996). Of particular importance are the kinds of interac-
tions that occur as speakers clarify their intended meaning, such as when speakers
have an opportunity to negotiate and reword what they are trying to say (Pica, Young,
and Doughty 1987; Pica 1994). Research into French immersion programs, French-
speaking schools that are designed for English-speaking students and that aim to
develop bilingual skills, has suggested that language “output” by the student—that is,
the language produced by the learners themselves—is critical for language develop¬
ment (Allen, Swain, Harley, and Cummins 1990; Swain 1995). This research found
that while students developed considerable fluency in their second language
(French), many did not develop native-like proficiency or grammatical accuracy,
despite hearing a great deal of French and being in a communicatively oriented class¬
room where French was used for learning subject content. Swain suggests that what
was missing in these classrooms was sufficient opportunity for students to produce
extended stretches of French themselves. She argues that actually producing lan¬
guage encourages learners to process the language more deeply than is required when
they simply listen, and tends to stretch or push learner language in a way that listen¬
ing alone does not. (If you have struggled to make yourself understood in another lan¬
guage, you will recognize that it is often at these moments of struggle that real steps
in learning are achieved.)
Swain also argues that when the context requires learners to focus on the ways they
are expressing themselves, they are pushed to produce more comprehensible, coherent,
and grammatically improved discourse. The classroom implication for this is not that lan¬
guage “form” per se should become a major teaching focus, but that it is important, at
times, for learners to have opportunities to use stretches of discourse in contexts where
there is a press on their linguistic resources, and where, for the benefit of their listeners,

15
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

they must focus not only on what they wish to say but on how they are saying it. The
activities suggested in this chapter set up contexts where this is likely to occur.

Classroom Talk and ESL Learners

One clear teaching implication of studies into second language acquisition is that the
degree of facility of second language learning in a classroom depends largely on how
classroom discourse is constructed. Think for a moment about the patterns of interac¬
tion that typify many classrooms. There is a particular kind of three-part exchange
between teacher and student that is very familiar to all teachers (and to their students)
and that a number of researchers have described as being the dominant interactional
pattern in classrooms (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Mehan 1979; Edwards and Mer¬
cer 1987). In this pattern of interaction, the teacher first asks a question (almost cer¬
tainly one to which he or she knows the answer); the student responds, often with a
single word or short answer; and then the teacher responds by evaluating the answer.
Such interactions are sometimes referred to as IRF (Initiation, Response, Feedback) or
IRE (Initiation, Response, Evaluation). Here are two examples:

Initiation Teacher What season comes after fall?

Response Student Winter.
Feedback Teacher Good girl.

Initiation Teacher: Now everyone, who can tell me what these are
called?
Response Student 1 A compass?
Feedback Teacher Not quite, nearly right . . .
Response Student 2 A pair of compasses.
Feedback Teacher Right, good!
Initiation Teacher And who knows what we can use them for?
Response Student 3 Making circles?
Feedback Teacher Right, we can draw circles with them

The IRF pattern is based on what has become known as a “display” question, a ques¬
tion that is primarily designed for students to display their learning. It is a common pat¬
tern in traditional classrooms, particularly where the teacher sees his or her role
primarily as transmitting a body of information. Of course, such interaction patterns are
sometimes very useful, such as when the teacher’s questions serve to provide a frame¬
work for a logical thought process, such as talking students through a math problem. So
it would be foolish to suggest that teachers should avoid all such interactions altogether
or that whole-class work is inappropriate. On the contrary, the second part of this chap¬
ter illustrates how teacher-student interactions, with a little modification to the pattern
just shown, can be very effective in supporting language development.

16
 Classroom Talk

However, if we look at the examples just shown, it’s easy to see that what they don’t
fulfil is the need for students to produce “comprehensible output.” When teacher ini¬
tiations lead only to single-word or single-clause responses, there is little opportunity
for the learner s language to be stretched, for students to focus on how they are saying
something, or for giving them practice in using the language for themselves. The
teacher in fact says far more than the students do! It is this kind of interaction that
prompted Edwards and Mercer (1987) to refer to the “two thirds” rule when they sug¬
gested, somewhat humorously but probably very accurately, that in most classrooms
someone is talking for most of the time, for most of the time it is the teacher, and for
most of the time the teacher is either lecturing or asking questions.
Teacher-student talk of this kind may therefore actually deprive learners of just
those interactional features and conditions that research suggests are enabling factors
in second language learning. A classroom program that is supportive of second lan¬
guage learning must therefore create opportunities for more varied and dialogic inter¬
actional patterns to occur.

Group Work and Second Language Learning

As the prior discussion suggests, where language development is a major objective of

a teaching program, there must be alternatives to IRF interactional patterns, and these
need to be deliberately planned and set up. One of the ways in which teachers can do
this is through the use of group work. Group work has a number of advantages for lan¬
guage learning.
When group work is set up effectively (and we will look at what this involves later
in this chapter), it has important advantages over whole-class work for second lan¬
guage learning. McGroarty (1993) suggests that it offers benefits to second language
learners in three ways that are important for language learning:

1. Learners hear more language, a greater variety of language, and have more lan¬
guage directed toward them: group-work situations increase the input to the
learner.
2. Learners interact more with other speakers, and therefore their output is also
increased. They tend to take more turns, and in the absence of the teacher,
have more responsibility for clarifying their own meanings. In other words, it is
the learners themselves who are doing the language learning work.
3. What learners hear and what they learn is contextualized: language is heard and
used in an appropriate context and used meaningfully for a particular purpose.

In addition:

• There is likely to be considerable message redundancy—that is, similar ideas will

be expressed in a variety of different ways. Asking questions, exchanging

17
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

information, and solving problems all provide a context where words are
repeated, ideas are rephrased, problems are restated, and meanings are refined.
This redundancy supports comprehension, because it gives learners several
opportunities to hear a similar idea expressed in a number of ways.
• The need to get information or clarify meaning increases the opportunities for
learners to ask questions that genuinely seek new information, and thus there
is further input and practice in genuine communication. (Compare this with
whole-class contexts where it is much more usual for the teacher to ask the
questions, and where students are often required to answer only for the pur¬
poses of showing what they know.)
• Finally, we should not forget that group work may have positive affective con¬
sequences: learners who are not confident in English often feel more comfort¬
able working with peers than being expected to perform in a whole-class
situation.

Fiere is an example that illustrates how children working together can collaboratively
do more than they can individually, and demonstrates again the collaborative nature
of learning discussed in Chapter 1. In this classroom, different groups of children had
each done a different experiment, all of which were designed to show the effects of
magnetic repulsion. The teacher had told all the children they would report to the rest
of the class about what happened, and what they had learned from doing their partic¬
ular experiment. This informal reporting was a regular occurrence in the classroom,
and, as we will see in the next chapter, it was a time when children could develop
common understandings and clarify new learning, and when new language and devel¬
oping concepts could be “recycled” or reviewed.
Before the reporting session began, the teacher explained to the students that they
needed to make what they said clear and comprehensible to their listeners, and they
needed to remember that the rest of the class did not know what other groups had
done. She explained that their language needed to be very clear and precise so that
everyone could understand what happened. She instructed the students to help the
other children to “try to get a picture in their mind of what you did.” At the beginning
of the reporting lesson, the children were given a few minutes to think about what they
would tell their peers.
In the group we focus on here, all the children but Emily, who was a fluent bilin¬
gual in Chinese and English, were identified as having ESL needs, and Milad and
Maroun were in the early stages of learning English. For their experiment, they were
asked to use a small polystyrene block into which a number of Popsicle sticks (referred
to as paddle pop sticks) had been inserted to form a cradle to hold a bar magnet in
place. The group was asked to test the effect of a second bar magnet when it was
placed above the first, and then to reverse the position of the second magnet. They
recorded their results. (Depending on the relative position of the poles, the magnets
either attracted or repelled. When repulsion occurred, the top magnet appeared to be

18
 Classroom Talk

floating above the bottom magnet.) In the dialogue that follows, they are planning how
they will report back to the class about this science experiment.
In the examples of the classroom talk in this book, a dot represents approximately
a one-second pause. Traditional punctuation is not used, since the excerpts are tran¬
scriptions of spoken language.

Emily: we have to talk about what we did last time and what were the
results . . .
Milad: we got em ... we got a . thing like . . . this . . . pu- we got paddle
pop sticks and we got
MarOUN: we put them in a pot
MlLAD: and have to try and put
GlNA: wasn’t in a pot. . . it’s like a foam . . .
MlLAD: a foam
Emily: a block of foam
Gina: and we put it
Emily: we put paddle pops around it, the foam, and then we put the mag¬
net in it
Gina: and then we got
Emily: and then we got another magnet and put it on top, and it wasn’t
touching the other magnet . .
MAROUN: when we . . . when we turned it the other way ... it didn’t stick on
because . . . because
GlNA: because?
MAROUN: because em ... it was on a different. . . side
MlLAD: Emily your go
Emily: OK. last week we . . . we . . . did an experiment ... we had a em a
block of foam and we um . . . stuck paddle pop sticks in it and we
put ... a magnet, a bar of magnet . . . into the em cradle that we
made with the paddle pop sticks. Then we put another magnet on
top and the result of this was . . . the magnet that we put on top of
the cradled magnet did not stick to the other magnet,
GlNA: then when we turned it around. When we turned the other magnet
around it. . .
MAROUN: stuck
MlLAD: it stuck together because
MAROUN: and it stuck together because it was
Emily: it was on a different side
GlNA: it was on a different side and the other one’s and
Emily: and the poles are different
Gina: and the poles are different
MlLAD: and em when ... we put on the first side it stuck together . . .

19
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

GlNA: because em it was on different sides, because we put it on the on the

thin side and it didn’t and we didn’t . . it didn’t stick . .
MAROUN: because the flat side is stronger than the thin side?
EMILY: no, because the poles are different
MlLAD: because the poles are different, alright?

What can we learn from this example? It is clear that a lot is being learned in this
group talk, both about science and about how to talk about it. All the children par-
ticipate in jointly constructing this discourse. For example, the term block of foam is
finally reached through a progressive clarification of an appropriate way to name it,
and this is built up by three speakers: a pot, not a pot, a foam, (repeated), a block of foam.
Students complete each other’s remarks and prompt each other to continue. The main
scientific understanding of the experiment is built up across seven turns that together
construct the statement: when we turned the other magnet around it stuck together because
it was on a different side and the poles are different. Through the process of joint con-
struction, the wording is gradually refined toward more explicit and writtendike lan¬
guage, and scientific understandings are reworked and modified (note that different
sides becomes different poles). Individual students are scaffolded by the contributions of
the group as a whole.
And so we can see that this kind of collective scaffolding is at times as useful as that
provided by the teacher. Although no student, except for Emily, possesses the ability to
construct this report alone, the students are able collectively to reach an appropriate
wording. Note, however, that this talk is not simply a functionally “empty” language
exercise, but the result of a real and shared purpose for the students, who knew that one
of them would be expected to share his or her learning with the class. Gina, who was cho¬
sen by the teacher for this task, explained her group’s experiment like this:

We put paddle pop sticks around the block of foam . . . and then ... we got a mag¬
net and put it in . . . and we got another magnet and put it on top but it wasn’t touch¬
ing the other magnet and then . when we turned it around it attach together, the two
magnets, when we put it on the side they attach . because . . because the poles are dif¬
ferent.

It seems unlikely that she would have been able to speak as fluently as this with¬
out the initial talk in a group. Notice that what she says here is beginning to sound
more like “written” language. As the next chapter will also suggest, oral reporting to
others is a useful bridge to writing.

Making Group Work Effective

How then should group work be organized if it is to be effective? What follows are
some important principles for group work that has, as part of its aim, the development

20
 Classroom Talk

of language. You may find it useful to use these as a checklist when you are planning
or carrying out group- or pair-work activities.

Clear and Explicit Instructions Are Provided

This may seem very obvious, yet it is often at the setting-up stage that even a well-
designed task can go wrong. As you may have observed in your own teaching, one of
the hardest listening tasks for ESL learners is to understand and remember a string of
instructions. While a single instruction may cause no problems, instructions that
involve a number of sequenced steps are often far more difficult. Try to put into prac¬
tice the notion of message redundancy” discussed earlier, by giving the same instruc¬
tions in several ways. For example, after you have told children what they are to do,
ask someone to retell what you said to the rest of the class, or ask individual children
to tell you each step in turn. Write it up on the board as they say it. Written instruc¬
tions on cards are also useful and will help keep children on task. And remember that
it is often better to demonstrate a game or activity with a student as your partner than
to give an explanation in words. In some tasks, and particularly with beginners, the
language of the explanation is often more complex than the language involved in the
task itself!
Here is an example of a teacher giving instructions to a group of ESL children who
are about to carry out the science experiment described earlier. First, she read from
written instructions:

Place a bar magnet into the cradle made by the paddle pop sticks. Place a second bar
magnet on top. Observe and record what happens. Repeat, alternating the poles.
Observe and record what happens.

Then she explained the instructions, providing scaffolding for the children (see Figure
2-1). The right-hand column comments on what the teacher was doing physically and
on the language she used.
The teacher then went on to discuss what it means to observe, and the ways in
which students could record what occurred. She also gave a copy of the instructions
to the group before they began the experiment.
The commentary column gives a good idea of how this teacher made sure the
instructions were comprehensible to her students. Notice how she introduced the use
of more formal terms (such as place and alternate) alongside more usual and familiar
terms (put and change) so that through this parallelism children could see the equiva¬
lencies in meaning. At the same time, she demonstrated the meaning of what she was
saying by physically handling the materials with which the children would be working.
Finally, the children had a set of written instructions to which they could later refer
(and that also modeled a more formal example of language use). Note that the teacher
was not simply giving the children a set of simplified instructions. On the contrary, the
written instructions were fairly typical of more formal written language and were

21
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Teacher’s words Commentary

You have to place a magnet, put a teacher refers to the written instructions,
magnet, into the cradle, and place introduces less well-known word place
another magnet on top of the alongside more familiar word put.
cradled magnet

So you’ve got one magnet in here pointing

then you have to put another magnet holding the second magnet, indicating
on top, right/ where it must be placed but not actually
placing it

. then you have to alt-ern-ate the alternate is said slowly and with emphasis
magnets.

It says “alternating the poles” . . . models the more formal word (alternate)
changing the poles. but uses this along with a familiar “every¬
day” word (change); also holds the
second magnet and indicates how the
magnet should be turned

so if you put it facing like this . . . demonstrating

you’ve got it one way like this,

then you change the poles around indicating the movement by turning the
second magnet in the air but not placing it

change it to the other side, alternate switches between more and less formal
the poles. terms

So you’re trying it each way summarizing what the children should do.

Figure 2-1. Scaffolding Instructions

appropriate for the age level of the children. At the same time, the teacher was build¬
ing bridges into this written text so that the learners were given access to new and
more formal language. She was amplifying, not simplifying, the language.

Talk Is Necessary for the Task

A group task should require, not simply encourage, talk. Let’s imagine that you are
working with the topic of insects. If you ask groups of children simply to “talk about”
a picture of insects, there is no real reason or need for the picture to be discussed, and
probably not all children will join in. In this case talk is invited, even encouraged, but
it is not required, since there is no authentic purpose for using it. However, if you give
a pair of children two similar pictures of insects that differ in some details (see Figure

22
 Classroom Talk

2-2), and ask them to find the differences between them (without showing each other
their pictures), this would require talk: without it, the task cannot be carried out. They
each need to describe their pictures aloud in order to determine what is different. This
particular kind of pair activity is called a Find the Difference Game.
The best pedagogic tasks involve some kind of information gap—that is, a situation
whereby different members within a group, or individuals in a pair, hold different or
incomplete information, so that the only way that the task can be completed is for this

23
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

information to be shared. The Find the Difference Game in Figure 2-2 illustrates this
principle. Pair activities like this are often called “barrier games,” referring to the fact
that partners do not show each other their information.
It is possible to use tbe information gap principle with a whole class. In the science
classroom we have been discussing, the teacher had set up five different experiments,
all designed to develop students’ understanding of the concepts of magnetic attraction
and repulsion. The teacher’s original plan was for all groups of students to do each of
these experiments over the course of a couple of weeks, and then to report to the
whole class about what they had learned. On reflection the teacher decided against
this, since this would have resulted in students talking about what was already famil¬
iar to the rest of the class (given that they would all have done the same things).
Instead, the teacher revised her plan and decided that each group would do a differ¬
ent experiment, so that when the time came for reporting what they had learned, each
group would be talking about something unknown to their audience; they would be
the “experts” in what they had done, and there would be a context for genuine infor¬
mation sharing. Talking about something that the rest of the class hasn’t experienced
themselves also requires students to be very explicit about what they have learned, and
to focus on making what they say comprehensible to the rest of the class.
Organizing the class into expert and home groups also fulfills the principle of
creating an information gap with a whole class. The basic idea here is that different
groups of learners become “experts” in a particular aspect of a topic. For example, in
a topic about insects, each group may choose to research a particular insect under
certain whole-class headings, such as description, habitat, food, life cycle, and interest-
ing facts. After each group has become an expert in one particular insect, the stu¬
dents go into new groups, so that one person from each expert group is in each new
group. Then each person shares his or her “expert” knowledge with the other group
members.
In this way, each individual becomes an expert in the home group and now has the
responsibility of sharing what he or she knows, while the nonexperts make notes. In
this way all information is shared, and the resulting notes may become the basis for a
piece of writing. Expert and borne groups are described more fully in the Glossary, and
in Chapter 4.

There Is a Clear Outcome for the Group Work

In well-designed activities, something happens as a result of the language being used.

There will be an outcome, a result, such as the solving of a problem, or the sharing of
information. Learners should be clear about what this outcome should be. For exam¬
ple, in the Find the Difference Game, they should know the number of differences
they are looking for, and know that they must name them. In the expert/home group
activity, the outcome will be that all children will have a set of written notes based on
what others have said and on their own research. It’s important to make the outcome

24
 Classroom Talk

of the task explicit to students when you are setting it up, so that they understand the
purpose of what they are doing and can see how it fits into a bigger picture.

The Task Is Cognitively Appropriate to the Learners

Ideally, the task should be at an appropriate level of cognitive challenge for the age of the
learners. This is not always easy to achieve, since with older learners who are very new
to English, tasks need to be cognitively demanding at the same time as having relatively
low English language demands. However, in general, when tasks are integrated into a
curriculum area, it is more likely that thinking is involved. Older learners are also likely
to have some literacy skills, and it may he that part of the task can draw on first language
resources. For example, students may initially discuss, read, or write in their first lam
guage. Try to involve beginners in tasks that are less dependent on language, such as
experiential science or mathematics activities, where they will be able to experience suc¬
cess and participate more easily. And remember that such tasks provide an essential
respite from the intense demands of continuously operating in an unfamiliar language.

The Task Is Integrated with a Broader Curriculum Topic

We have seen in Chapter 1 how a functional view of language relates language to the
context in which it is used. We do not first “learn” language and then later “use” it. Sec¬
ond language learners do not in any case have the time to study English as a “subject”
before they use it to learn other things: they must begin to use it as a medium for learn¬
ing as soon as they enter school, simultaneously developing their second language hand-
in-hand with curriculum knowledge. As Mohan (2001) points out, we cannot place
ESL students’ academic development on hold while they are learning English. And so
as far as possible, language learning tasks should be integrated with learning across the
curriculum. Language tasks and exercises that are simply an “add-on” to the curriculum
not only work against this, but are a frustrating experience for the teacher who then has
to find time for such extra work. In Chapter 7 we will look in more detail at how pro¬
gram planning can incorporate both language and content objectives. Here I will note
only that one of the advantages of situating language teaching within a curriculum area
is that the language and conceptual content will be more familiar to students, and the
language practice gained in the activity itself can help to introduce or recycle the con¬
cepts, grammar, or vocabulary associated with particular curriculum knowledge. All the
activities and tasks listed in the Glossary can be situated within a range of subject areas,
and they can be integrated with the particular topic being studied.

All Children in the Group Are Involved

As a teacher, you will no doubt have had students who don’t participate in group work,
perhaps because they don’t like working in this way, feel insecure about their contri¬
bution, are dominated by others in the group, or simply prefer to let others do the
work. There are two ways in which you can help ensure that all children are involved.

25
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

First, the overall organizational structure can be such that it requires the participation
of all group members. Expert/home groupings require that all members carry out their
responsibilities, or otherwise the home group will not have all the information it needs.
And the peer group is very good at making sure this work gets done! As I overheard
one learner insist to another, when a home group was sharing information on insects,
“Go on, you tell us, you’re the butterfly!” Students are urged to take responsibility
because the group wants them to, not just because the teacher expects them to. In this
way, group work serves as an effective prompt for learning and helps students develop
a sense of personal worth and responsibility.
Second, until children are used to working in groups, members of the group should
each have a role to play. These can include a timekeeper, a recorder, a reporter, some-
one who keeps the group on task, someone who ensures everyone has an opportunity
to contribute, and so on. Not only does this give a special responsibility to all the mem¬
bers of the group, but it also helps ensure that the group work runs effectively.

Students Have Enough Time to Complete Tasks

The question of time is a very important one: too much, and children are likely to waste
it; not enough, and they are unlikely to learn effectively or be able to engage in the activ¬
ity as fully as they could. Second language students are likely to take longer to complete
language-based tasks, since they need longer to process what they hear and to respond
to language that is directed to them. I have found that inexperienced teachers will often
design a wonderful set of tasks but aim to do too much in one lesson, so that children are
no sooner into one task than another one is begun. Well-designed tasks are worth
exploiting. Don’t underestimate the time it takes to give clear instructions, for the task
to be completed, and for a summing up of what students have done or learned. Each of
these processes involve language and are an opportunity to model, recycle, and revise it.
They can be as much a part of the learning as the task itself or the end product.

Students Know How to Work in Groups

Working in groups is a learned skill—even some adults are not good at it! If learners
are unable to work collaboratively, even the best-designed teaching activities are
unlikely to be successful. Effective participation implies the taking of initiative, and
that is only possible when students understand and subscribe to the “rules” of class¬
room behavior. While most classrooms have some agreed-upon rules for behavior,
group work is often based on “unwritten” and assumed knowledge about how to work
together. Making such knowledge explicit is helpful for all children, but especially for
those less familiar with the learning culture and norms of the school.
Here is an example of one teacher talking with her students about working col¬
laboratively in a group. As a conclusion to work on magnets, the children are about to
design a game based on the properties of magnets. The teacher is talking with the chil¬
dren about what makes group work a success.

26
 Classroom Talk

Teacher: you re going to come up with one game . . OK ... so you have to do
a lot of negotiating, because you’re all going to have lots of good
ideas . . hut if... is it going to be like this . . . get into the group
. . . and say, “I know what we’re doing, me me me, I’ve decided?” is
that how we work in groups?
Students no.
Teacher what sorts of things can we remember? Simon?
Simon em . . . share your ideas?
Teacher good take turns share your ideas because four people’s ideas or
three people’s ideas have to be better than one person’s ideas, don’t
they? we’ll get a lot more . . Fabiola?
Fabiola: communicate with your group.
Teacher: how do you communicate with your group . . . that’s very true, but
how do you do it?
Fabiola: like instead of. . . em when you start with your group you don’t em
shout, and don’t ... “I know what we should do and this is what
we can do . . ” and if someone want to talk it over say “no, this is
what we’re going to do.”
Teacher: OK .. so it’s a lot of. . . first of all, turn taking, and quiet group-work
voices, and maybe sharing your ideas. . certainly . “oh, an idea I
have” or “one idea I have,” or “a suggestion that I have” .. put it for¬
ward as a suggestion or an idea . . people will be much more willing to
listen to it than if you say . . “this is what we’re going to do . . so be
careful with the sort of group-work language that you use”
Gina: Miss how about if like . . . you have four people in your group and
one want [sic] to do something and another one want to do some¬
thing else and they all want to do different things?
Teacher: they’ve all got different ideas? good, good question . . does anyone
have any suggestions for Gina? if you get into your group and every¬
one says “well this is my idea,” “this is my idea” “this is my idea,”
“this is my idea” . . and no one wants to . . . move from their idea?

[Lots of students indicate they have ideas]

Teacher what could be some strategies? Duncan.

Duncan em, you could put them all together . . . like . . . like make them one.
Fabiola make up into one game
Teacher OK so maybe try to combine the ideas to make up one game, that
could be one thing . . what if they don’t go together, though? what
if the ideas are very very different? how could you work with it then
Anna?
Anna: em you could em find a piece of paper and write it and scrunch up
and put it into a hat

27
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Teacher: OK choose it. . . maybe say “Alright, we can’t decide ... so that’s
the most tair way to do it. .” that could be one way . . thats
another suggestion . yes Charbel?
Charbel: do an arm wrestle? [laughing]
Teacher: oh probably not the most appropriate
way . certainly an idea. [laughing] yes
. we might get ourselves into real
trouble though . . . thank you, I don’t
think Mr. W. [the principal] would be
too impressed it he walked in and saw
us arm wrestling over what we decide
to do . he probably wouldn’t think
that was appropriate group-work “Do an arm wrestle’
behavior . [laughing] Robert?
Robert: miss if you can’t think of one you can em . . . you can you can . . .
play it? and see which one’s a good one.
Teacher: OK good suggestion . . yes, Andre?
Andre: Oh Miss like . . . you’re going to vote for which one is the most fun
Teacher: that’s a good idea . maybe you could say you can’t vote for your own
but you can vote for one of the others . sometimes though it’s just
. . . not being stubborn . . . you know . thinking . really trying to step
back and think “well, it doesn’t matter whose idea it is, but what
would he the best idea for the task that we’re trying to complete?”

This kind of talk makes explicit to children some of the ways they will be expected
to work. But perhaps even more important is the fact that the “rules” are collabora-
tively built up, with the children’s contributions being valued by the teacher and
expanded on. In this process, the teacher also provides models of what (and what not!)
to say. The interpersonal language involved in working collaboratively, such as know¬
ing how to express agreement and disagreement, knowing how to offer an opinion,
knowing how to build on a suggestion, or knowing how to request something politely
or give advice, may not he known in English by some students. Remember that the lan¬
guage of the classroom is not simply the language of the content being studied, but
includes these interpersonal aspects of learning too. I have sometimes heard teachers
complaining that their ESL students are impolite or abrupt, yet the reason is often sim¬
ply that the students do not have access to this kind of language in English, or that it
has never been made salient or explicit to them.
So building this into your teaching, at those times when it is most relevant, is an
important part of the ESL program. And remember that one of the most simple and effec¬
tive ways for improving group work is to talk with the children about what the teacher
shown here referred to as “quiet group-work voices”! Encourage children to speak as qui¬
etly as possible, so as to avoid the situation all too familiar to teachers, when noise levels
steadily increase as everyone seeks to make themselves heard above the others.

28
 Classroom Talk

Remember that for ESL learners, a noisy environment makes comprehension that much
harder.

Some Suggestions for Group and Pair Activities Across the Curriculum

Here are some examples of types of activities to use with groups. They can all be
adapted for a range of levels and subject areas.

Picture Sequencing

For this activity, you will need a set of picture cards that tell a simple and predictable
story or illustrate a predictable sequence (see Figure 2-3). Give each student in the
group one card (there should be the same number of students as there are picture
cards). Tell the students not to show the others in their group their card. Each student
describes their card (it doesn’t matter who starts), and when they have all finished

FIGURE 2-3. Picture Sequencing

29
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

describing the cards, the group decides on the basis of the descriptions which card
should come first, which second, and so on. On the basis of the order decided, the stu¬
dents put down their cards in sequence. For younger students and those very new to
English, make sure that cards are placed from left to right. This activity can lead to
writiiag a story based on the pictures, or writing a description of a sequence of events.

Hot Seat

Seat children in a circle, with one chair being designated the “hot seat.” The student
in the hot seat portrays a character from a book that has been shared by the class or a
historical character. Other students ask him or her questions to find out more about
the character’s life. You can change the time frames too, moving back into the past or
forward into the future. If the character is historical, details must be correct. The hot-
seat activity is described more fully in Chapter 5.

Questionnaires

Students can survey their classmates, other students in the school, teachers, or com¬
munity members to complete questionnaires about a range of topics: favorite types of
reading, television programs, eating habits, views about a particular issue, and so on.
They can use the information they have gained as a basis for further class work, per¬
haps involving a quantification or comparison of results, or the questionnaire can be
one means of gaining information for a larger project that students are involved with.
Apart from giving students practice in asking questions, the activity is also an oppor¬
tunity for teachers to talk with students about the appropriate ways to do this, taking
into account the level of formality that is required in this context as students may be
interacting with people they do not know well.

Problem Solving

Contexts for problem solving occur in all curriculum areas. Groups of children must
solve a problem by discussion and report back to the class about their solutions. Exer¬
cises where students are encouraged to think laterally, in unusual and creative ways
that are less bound by the constraints of formal logical thinking, also provide fun con¬
texts for spoken language.
For example, ask the children, in groups, to think about “problems” such as the
following:

How can you combine two of the following to make something new: a paintbrush,
a wheelbarrow, a garbage bin, four wheels, a spade, a tent?
Possible solution: Put the tent on the wheels to make a mobile home.
How many uses can you think of for an old car tire?
Possible solution: Grow flowers in it; use it as a swing.

30
 Classroom Talk

Paired Problem Solving

This activity is useful in those situations where something is to be made, such as in art,
in design and technology, or in science. In the following example, which is taken from
the work of Jenny Des-Fountain and Alan Howe (1992), pairs of students are engaged
in two different problem-solving activities, based on a book they have read. One group
of pairs is designing a mobile, and the other is designing a boat made out of newspaper
that will keep afloat twenty marbles. When the groups have finished, different pairs
come together to cross-question each other about what they did, how they did it, and
what problems they faced. The group who made the boat had a problem! In the chil¬
dren’s words:

Sylvia: It kept on sinking, and the newspaper, it kept on . . .

MaNZEER: Leaking.
SYLVIA: Breaking.

Sylvia and Manzeer continue by describing what they did and what happened.
Their first attempt at making the boat had fallen apart. As Manzeer said, “It looked
like a bit of food; it was all cut up.” The other pair begin to question them about the
shape, and one student makes the suggestion that perhaps it should have been flat-
bottomed. There is a very real point to this discussion, since the next part of the activ¬
ity is for each pair to complete the other activity.
This kind of hands-on, problem-solving activity is an excellent one to use with
ESL learners. At the stage when the object is being constructed, those with little En¬
glish can participate on a more equal footing, since this stage of the activity will be less
language dependent. As we suggested in Chapter 1, language that is “situation embed¬
ded” is easier both to produce and to understand. Second, new language will be heard
in context, and it is more likely to be noticed and taken up since the need to use it will
be immediate. Third, the activity as a whole can be pitched at an appropriate cogni¬
tive level—it is a challenging task that demands critical thinking and problem-solving
skills, not simply language “rehearsal.”
In addition, during the discussion that follows the hands-on activity, three partic¬
ular aspects of language are likely to be modeled and reinforced:

1. Questioning. The children must ask questions of each other. Here the children
asked, “What happened to yours? What happened in the end? Did you make a
newspaper boat first? Did you do a flat bottom?” As we noted earlier, in gen¬
eral children have few opportunities to ask questions, and this is a very good
opportunity to practice question forms in an authentic context.
2. Reporting. The two pairs must report what they did to each other. This requires
them to give information to others who did not share in the experience, and thus
to use the kind of explicit language discussed earlier. (If the teacher wishes to focus
on this, it would also provide an authentic context for using the past tense.)

31
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

3. Making Suggestions. The discussion requires the listeners to make constructive

suggestions. In this case, one of the speakers in the group provided a good model
of how to offer a suggestion when she suggested how to improve the design of the
boat: “Do you think you should have done a flat bottom?” As discussed earlier,
this kind of language is not necessarily just “picked up” by ESL students, and the
context of this activity would be an excellent one for the teacher to focus on some
specific ways of making suggestions: “Do you think you should . . . Maybe you
could . .. How about if you had . . . Perhaps it would be better if. . This could
be a focus in the initial setting up of the activity as a whole.

Note that this activity exemplifies a number of principles for well-designed group
work in an ESL classroom: there is a real need to talk, and an authentic purpose for it;
it has a built-in information gap, since pairs hold different information; all children are
involved; it is cognitively demanding; and it is embedded in a curriculum topic that
the children have been studying.

Activities Especially for Beginners

Again, all of these activities can he integrated with particular subject topics.

Inquiry and Elimination

(Practices question forms and helps develop logical thinking.)

Choose a large picture showing a range of objects within a set, such as a picture
showing a number of different animals. One member of the group chooses an animal
and the others must guess which one it is by asking yes/no questions only. It’s impor¬
tant to restrict the number of questions that can be asked so that guesses are not just
random. Instead, encourage children to ask those questions that elicit the maximum
amount of information. For example, the answer yes to the question does it fly imme¬
diately eliminates all those animals that don’t tly.

I’m Thinking Of .. .

(Practices describing things and their functions, use of that.)

Use a set of pictures of objects related to a particular topic being studied, such as
sets of dinosaur pictures, animals, tools, food, forms of transport. Each student in the
group says “I’m thinking of something that is . . .” and then proceeds to describe the
object. Whoever guesses the object then takes the next turn.

Describe and Draw

(Practices giving instructions, describing objects, describing position—under, near, next to,
to the left of, etc.)

32
 Classroom Talk

Children work in pairs, and each has a blank sheet of paper and drawing rnateri'
als. Child A describes to Child B what she or he is drawing, and Child B reproduces
the drawing according to A’s description. This is a barrier game—they should not be
able to see each other’s work.

Find My Partner

(Practices question forms and describing.)

Deal out to the group four to six pictures, two of which are identical, with the oth-
ers having minor differences. Pictures can be related to a curriculum topic. One of the
two identical pictures should be marked with an X, and whoever is dealt that card has
to find the other picture by questioning other members of the group. (See Figure 2-4.)

Figure 2-4. Find My Partner

33
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

What Did You See1

(Practices vocabulary.)
On a table, place a selection of objects, or pictures of objects, that are related to a
topic being studied. After children have looked at them for a few moments, cover the
objects with a cloth, and see how many objects children can remember.

Finally, as a general checklist for pair and group activities, consider these points:

• Is talking really necessary for the task or activity to be completed?

• Are content areas of the curriculum being reinforced?
• Are children using stretches of language?
• Is thinking involved?
• Are all children involved in some way?

Talking with Children

So far, we have focused on the advantages of using group work in the classroom. But
there will be times when the whole class works together, with the teacher in traditional
position at the front of the class. Often, as we have suggested, the kind of interaction
in which teacher and students commonly engage in such situations is not supportive
of ESL development, in that children get fewer chances to speak, and say little when
they do. However, even in teacher-centered situations, interactions can be modified to
allow for a more equal distribution of speaking rights.
In Chapter 1, we saw how the notion of a zone of proximal development presents
learning as something accomplished through collaboration. The more experienced
participant supports the less experienced participant with those aspects of the task that
the learner is not yet able to do alone. In the example shown in Figure 2-5, children
are taking part in what I call teacher-guided reporting. It refers to those times when
a student is asked to report to the whole class about what he or she has done or
learned. It’s probably an activity that you use yourself; you may refer to it as “report¬
ing back” or “reporting to the class” or “reviewing.”
Here the term teacher-guided reporting is adopted to make more explicit the role
of the teacher in providing scaffolding for the learner. Children may not always find it
easy to explain clearly to others what they have done or learned, and for ESL learners
in particular, this may be a daunting task that pushes them beyond what they are able
to do alone in English. In teacher-guided reporting, the teacher provides scaffolding by
clarifying, questioning, and providing models for the speaker, so that the learner and
teacher together collaboratively build up what the learner wants to say. Just as the
father and mother provided interactional scaffolding to Nigel in the “goat text,”
whereby he was able to reach further in his language than he could have done alone,
so too can a teacher provide scaffolding for learners so that the interaction becomes a
supportive context for second language development.

34
 Classroom Talk

Student Teacher Commentary

1 what did you find out? T opens with an open
question
2 if you put a nail . onto the piece
of foil . . and then pick it . pick
it up . . the magnet will.
that if you put a . nail . under a
piece of foil . and then pick .
pick the foil up with the magnet
. . still . still with the nail . .
under it... it won’t

3 it what? It what? = it does

what ? T. is looking for a
verb

4 it won’t/ it won’t come out

5 what won’t come out? What = what does it

refer to?

6 it’ll go up

7 wait just a minute . . T. asks L. to clarify

can you explain that
a bit more, Loretta?

8 like if you put a nail and then

foil over it and then put the nail
on top . of the foil . . the nail
underneath the foil . Miss, I
can’t say it

9 no, you’re doing fine T. encourages L.

I . I can see Affirms she understands
what L is trying to say.

10 Miss, forget about the magnet/

em the magnet holds it with the
foil up the top and the nail’s
underneath and the foil’s on top
and put the magnet in it and

Figure 2-5. Teacher-Guided Reporting (1) (continued)

35
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Student Teacher Commentary

you lift it up . . and the nail

will em . . . hold it/stick with the
magnet and the foil’s in
between

11 oh . so even with the T “recasts” what L has

foil in between . the . said.
magnet will still pick
up the nail . alright
does the magnet pick
up the foil?

12 no

Figure 2-5. Teacher* Guided Reporting (1) (continued)

In the classroom dialogue shown in Figure 2-5, the more experienced participant
(the teacher) supports the less experienced participant (the student) to carry out a
demanding language task (reporting to the class). Loretta, the student, had been sep-
arating a number of objects into magnetic and nonmagnetic groups. She had discov¬
ered first that a nail was magnetic and that aluminum foil was not. She had then
placed a piece of aluminum foil between a magnet and a nail, discovering that the
magnet still attracted the nail.
Explaining this makes considerable linguistic demands on Loretta, and she clearly
finds it very difficult to verbalize what she wants to say. Her comment in Turn 8, “Miss,
I can’t say it,” gives some indication of just how difficult the task is for her. Also note
how much she pauses and how “hesitant” she appears. As you read, consider how the
teacher provides scaffolding for the learner, so that with this guidance, Loretta is able
to complete the task successfully. Notice too the overall pattern; although this is in one
sense a “teacher-controlled” interaction, the teacher doesn’t dominate—as you can
see from the text, the learner says far more than the teacher.
In terms of language development, this exchange with the teacher is very sup¬
portive for Loretta. Each of her three attempts to report what she has done (2, 8, 10)
become progressively less hesitant and more understandable, with the last attempt
being a greatly improved version of her initial attempt (2). How does the teacher sup¬
port the learner to make this happen?
First, the teacher begins with an open question to which there is no pre-scripted
reply. Although the teacher knows in general what Loretta has done, it is left to
Loretta herself to initiate what she wants to talk about. In other words, she enters the
conversation on her own terms. In general, it is a much easier task for learners to ini¬
tiate what they want to talk about than to respond to what someone else wants them

36
 Classroom Talk

to talk about. Second, the teacher provides very specific scaffolding on precisely those
language items that need to be clarified for the listeners: the action being referred to
(3) and the thing being referred to (5). She gives a word of encouragement, but she
resists recasting or rewording what Loretta has said until the eleventh turn in the con-
versation. This added time allows Loretta two more attempts to explain what she is
trying to say and more opportunity to focus on how she is expressing it.
What can be learned from this exchange? First, it is important to find a balance
between straight “display” questions and those that allow learners to negotiate what
they want to say. When you are questioning children about what they have learned,
possible openers could include:

Tell us what you learned.

Tell us about what you did.
What did you find out?
What would you like to tell us about?
What did you find most interesting?

Try monitoring your own talk to see what openers you use most often.
Second, it is important to SLOW DOWN the dialogue. This doesn’t mean that
you should speak more slowly, but that the overall pace of the discourse should allow
sufficient time for learners to think about what they are saying, and thus how they are
saying it. This can be achieved in two ways. First, you can increase “wait time”—that
is, the time you wait for the learner to respond. Increasing this by just an extra couple
of seconds makes a big difference to how much students say, how clearly they say it,
and how much they are able to demonstrate what they understand. Second, you can
allow more turns before you evaluate or recast (reword) what the learner has said. The
teacher in the transcript shown in Figure 2-5 made a significant choice: she could
have recast what the student was attempting to say at Turn 3 but chose not to, instead
waiting until Turn 11. She thus allowed the student to have several attempts, offering
much more opportunity for student output. She uses a simple strategy, which is to ask
the student to clarify meaning rather than take responsibility for doing this herself. Her
responses to the student do not simply evaluate what the student has said; instead,
they prompt the student to have another go: “Can you explain that a bit more?” Teach-
ers can also do this by saying things like:

Can you say that again?

I don’t quite understand. Can you tell me that again?
Tell me a little more.
Can you just expand on that a little more?
What do you mean?
Can you explain it again?

37
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Whenever you say something like this, you are slowing down the pace of the dis¬
course, because you are giving learners a chance to formulate, as far as they are able,
a more explicit way of saying what they want to say. And there is considerable evidence
that learners who have more opportunities to reflect on and improve their own com¬
munication receive more long-term benefits for language learning than those who con¬
stantly have communication problems solved for them by the teacher. Of course, you
need to use your own judgment in relation to individual learners, and decide how
much responsibility for clarification you put onto them, but almost certainly most ESL
students will be able to say more if they are given more time during the process of an
interaction.
Third, it is important to respond to meaning. This involves really listening to what
the students say, rather than waiting for the answer you would like them to give! While
the teacher’s scaffolding in this example could be seen as a focus on form—that is, on
the grammar and structure of the language—everything that she says is ultimately in
the service of meaning making, not for the sake of practicing grammar. As Lily Wong-
Fillmore (1985) says in her study of effective teachers of very young ESL students, the
teachers “were effective communicators . . . because all of them were concerned with
communication” (40).

In Summary—Making It Happen
In this chapter we have seen that both student-student and teacher-student talk can
provide rich contexts for second language development. But just allowing talk to occur
is not enough. Productive talk does not just happen—it needs to be deliberately and
systematically planned, just as we plan for literacy events. Julianna’s comment in
Chapter 1—“I can say what I want, but not for school work and strangers”—reminds
us that developing a language for learning is not a matter of chance. How tasks are
designed, how group work is set up, and how teachers respond to students all impact
on how effective classroom talk is in supporting language development. And some¬
times, as we have seen, even quite small changes in how opportunities for talk are set
up can have significant effects on how the discourse is played out. It is not an exag¬
geration to suggest that classroom talk determines whether or not children learn, and
their ultimate feelings of self-worth as students. Talk is how education happens!

Suggestions for Further Reading

COOK, S. 1998. Collaborative Learning Activities in the Classroom: Designing Inclusive Materials
for Learning and Language Development. Leicester, UK: Resource Centre for Multicultural
Education.

Corson, D. 1993. “Language Policy and Minority Culture.” Chapter 3 in Language, Minority
Education and Gender, ed. D. Corson. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

38
 Classroom Talk

McGroarty, M. 1992. “Cooperative Learning: The Benefits for Content'Area Teaching." In

The Multicultural Classroom, ed. E Richard-Amato and M. Snow. New York: Longman.

McGROARTY, M. 1993. “Cooperative Learning and Language Acquisition.” In Cooperative

Learning: A Response to Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, ed. D. Holt. Washington, DC:
Center for Applied Linguistics.

39
 3
From Speaking to Writing in
the Content Classroom

Prior experience becomes a context for interpreting the

new experience . . . prior experiences serve as the con¬
texts within which the language being used is to be
understood. Lily Wong-Fillmore, “When Does
Teacher Talk Work as Input?”

Using the Mode Continuum

In Chapter 1, I briefly touched on the idea of register. One of the ways we looked at
this was to compare four short science texts. Here are four similar texts again, this time
as more extended pieces of language. They illustrate how certain linguistic features
change as language becomes increasingly closer to written forms.

Text 1: (spoken by three 10-year-old students, with accompanying action)

this . . . no, it doesn’t go . . . it doesn’t move ... try that . . . yes, it does ... a bit . . . that
won’t. . . won’t work, it’s not metal . . . these are the best. . . going really fast.

Text 2: (spoken by one student about the action, after the event)
we tried a pin ... a pencil sharpener . . . some iron filings and a piece of plastic . . . the mag¬
net didn’t attract the pin.

Text 3: (written by the same student)

Our experiment was to find out what a magnet attracted. We discovered that a magnet attracts
some kinds of metal. It attracted the iron filings, but not the pin.

Text 4: (taken from a child’s encyclopedia)

A magnet ... is able to pick up, or attract, a piece of steel or iron because its magnetic field
flows into the magnet, turning it into a temporary magnet. Magnetic attraction occurs only
between ferrous materials.

40
 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom

As discussed in Chapter 1, the term mode is used in Halliday’s functional linguistics to

refer to the channel of communication, whether it is spoken or written. The four texts
shown here together form a continuum from spoken to written language. Using Mar-
tins (1984) term, we will refer to this sequence as a mode continuum.
Text 1 is typical of the kind of situation-embedded language produced in face-to-
face contexts. The fact that everyone can see what is being talked about means that
objects need not be named—instead, a speaker can use reference words (such as this,
these, that), to verbally point” to things in the immediate environment and know that
the other participants in the conversation will understand what is being referred to.
In Text 2 the context changes because the student is telling others what she
learned and no longer has the science equipment in front of her. She must now recon¬
struct the experience through language alone, so she makes explicit the things or peo¬
ple she is referring to (we, pin, pencil sharpener, iron filings, piece of plastic) and names
what is happening (attract.)
Text 3 is a written text and, since the audience is
now unseen, the writer can’t rely on shared assump¬
tions: she can’t assume that readers of the text will
know anything at all about the particular events she
is describing. So, once again, the writer must recreate
the experience through language alone, but this time
she also needs to provide an orientation for the read¬
ers in order to provide a context for what follows: Our
experiment was to .. .
In Text 4 there is no reference to a specific exper¬
Reconstructing Experience iment. The magnet referred to here as a magnet is
Through Language Alone generic: its properties are those of all magnets. There
is an increase in technical terms and in the density of
the text; a lot of information is being packed in. One way of packing in information in
a written text is to use a nominalization, meaning that a process or verb (attract) is
turned into a noun (attraction). Turning processes into nouns is typical of much writ¬
ten language because it is very often the general concept or phenomenon we want to
talk about, rather than the people and processes around a specific event.
While spoken and written language obviously have distinctive characteristics, this
continuum of texts illustrates that there is no absolute boundary between them. Tech¬
nology increases this blurring. Leaving a detailed message on an answering machine,
for example, may be quite linguistically demanding since, in the absence of two-way
contact, and without (initially at least) the shared understandings and expectations
that are implicit in two-way, face-to-face communication, we are required to “speak
aloud” the kind of language that would more usually be written. Thus in terms of the
mode continuum, it is perhaps more appropriate to describe texts as “more spoken-
like” or “more written-like,” and these are the terms that will be used here.

41
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

As discussed briefly in Chapter 1, texts that are most spokendike (like Text 1) are
often dependent for their interpretation on the situation in which they occur: they are
situation-embedded. More written-like texts are not embedded in the situation itself;
they must be complete enough in themselves to create their own context for the lis¬
tener or reader. Thus as we move along the mode continuum, texts are no longer
dependent on the situation in which they occur: if we read a book while at the beach,
for example, our understanding of what we read and how we interpret the language
usually has nothing to do with the fact that we are sitting on a beach.
As Chapter 1 pointed out, a second language learner is likely to have fewer diffi¬
culties with producing something like Text 1, where the situational context itself pro¬
vides a support for meaning and there are thus fewer linguistic demands, than with
more written-like texts, where more lexico-grammatical resources are required (those
involving grammar and vocabulary). It is worth noting, too, that when children are
expected to write simply on the basis of personal experiences, they are being asked to
take a very large linguistic step (as can be seen by comparing Texts 1 and 3), and one
that is beyond the current linguistic resources of some second language learners. If you
reflect back on the spoken language activities described in the previous chapter, you’ll
see that many of them require learners to use more explicit spoken language (like Text
2). This is the reason, for example, why barrier games such as Find the Difference are
designed the way they are. If students were to show each other their pictures, they
would be using language as in Text 1; by not showing each other the pictures, they are
using language more like Text 2, and thus are practicing a more written-like register.
In this chapter we will look at how one teacher used the notion of the mode con¬
tinuum as a major organizing principle in the planning of her classroom program. (For
a fuller description of this program, see Gibbons 2001.) For all but two of her students,
English was a second or subsequent language, and therefore her whole curriculum
needed to be supportive of language development as well as to focus on appropriate
content. Using the mode continuum as a linguistic framework, she designed teaching
activities that were sequenced from most situation-embedded, or most spoken-like (and
thus for ESL learners the most easily understood), to least situation-dependent, or most
written-like (a written journal). A major focus for the teacher was to help students use
spoken language in the way that Text 2 illustrates—that is, spoken language that is not
dependent on the immediate situational context in which it occurs. This more written-
like spoken language serves as a language bridge between the talk associated with expe¬
riential activities and the more formal—and often written—registers of the curriculum.
Based on the science topic of magnetism, the teacher planned teaching and learning
activities to reflect points along the mode continuum so as to offer a logical development
in temis of language learning. Here are the stages that the children moved through:

1. Doing an experiment (small groups). Learners initially participated in small-group

learning experiences based on a number of science experiments in which the
language used was tied in with the situation the children were in. What they

42
 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom

talked about teferred directly to the actions in which they were taking part, and
to what was happening in front of them.
2. Introducing key vocabulary (whole class). At this point the teacher briefly intro¬
duced the words attract and repel to the children.
3. Teacher'guided reportmg (whole class). Groups of students, with the help of the
teacher, shared their learning with the whole class. Since this did not involve
the use of the concrete materials, students had to use language more explicitly,
which provided a linguistic bridge into journal writing. During this part of the
cycle, the teacher also helped the children build up generalizations by directing
children’s attention to the commonalties in each group’s findings.
4- Journal writing (individual). This was the final activity of the cycle and linguisti¬
cally the most demanding.

This cycle was repeated several times during the unit on magnets.
The stages are described in more detail in the following section, together with
examples of the language the children used. You will see that the children gradually
learn to use language in ways that are more appropriate to the context they are in
(learning and talking about science). Note as well the role that the teacher-learner talk
plays in this development.

Stage 1: Doing an Experiment

In many elementary schools, it is usual for students to rotate through a number of activ¬
ities over the course of one or two lessons. However, as suggested in Chapter 2, this kind
of organizational structure negates any authentic purpose for reporting back to others,
since children are likely to have shared very similar experiences. Here, the teacher
made an attempt to set up a genuine communicative situation by having each group of
children work at different (though related) science experiments. And so, by the time
they had completed their experiments, each group of children held different informa¬
tion from other class members. In its communicative structure, the classroom organiza¬
tion was based on what we referred to in the previous chapter as an information “gap,”
so that there was an authentic exchange of information at the reporting stage.
The children were carrying out the experiment described in Chapter 2. Prior to
beginning the activity, they were told that they would later describe, and attempt to
explain, to the rest of the class what happened. The texts that follow occurred as stu¬
dents were engaged in this activity.

Text 1
Hannah try . . . the other way
Marco like that
Hannah north pole facing down
Joanna we tried that
Daniella oh!

43
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Hannah it stays up!

Marco magic!
Daniella let’s show the others
Joanna mad!
Daniella I’ll put north pole facing north pole ... see what happen
Marco that’s what we just did
Daniella yeah . . . like this . . . look

[The dialogue continues for several minutes longer as the students try different posh
dons for the magnet, and then they begin to formulate an explanation.]

Hannah: can I try that? ... I know why ... I know why . . . that’s like . .
because the north pole is on this side and that north pole’s
there ... so they don’t stick together
Daniella: what . . like this? yeah
Hannah: yeah . . see because the north pole on this side . hut turn it on the
other . . this side like that . . . turn it that way . . yeah
Daniella: and it will stick
Hannah: and it will stick because . look . . the north pole’s on that side
because . .
Daniella: the north pole’s on that side yeah

At this stage, the children do not know the terms attract and repel. Instead, they
use familiar words like stick or push away. (Sometimes this led to very interesting
comments—one child was overheard to say, as he was holding two magnets that were
repelling each other, “It feels like a strong wind!”)
What can we learn from this example? First, we can see again how small-group
work supports learning. Together children explored and developed certain scientific
understandings, namely that the position of the poles is significant in how the magnets
behave. They also attempted to hypothesize about the causal relations involved (note
the use of the connectives so, because). So, even though they were not using what we
might think of as science language, they were learning a lot about science. As the dis¬
course progresses, individual utterances became longer and more explicit, and this
occurred as the students began to formulate explanations for what they saw. The
teacher’s instruction to “try to explain what you see” was significant here, since it
extended the task from simply “doing” to “doing and thinking.” Wegerif and Mercer
(1996) suggest that it is through this kind of exploratory talk “that knowledge begins
to he built up and reasoning is made more visible” (51). This piece of learning later
became shared knowledge when the children reported to the rest of the class, and was
the basis upon which the teacher next introduced subject-specific vocabulary such as
attract and repel.

44
 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom

Stage 2: Introducing Key Vocabulary

Before the children reported to the rest of the class, the teacher introduced a new
vocabulary item, drawing on the experiences the children have just had and at the
same time demonstrating the meanings physically:

now I m going to give you another word for what Joseph was trying to say one more
scientific word . some of you were saying it pushes away ... or slips off... so instead
of saying the magnet pushes away I’m going to give you a new word . .. repel [said with
emphasis] . it actually means to push away from you [demonstrating with her arm] .
repel.

From the point of view of second language learning, it is important to note that in this
classroom the children were given an opportunity to develop some understandings
about magnets before they were expected to understand and use more scientific dis-
course. It is not until after the group work that the teacher introduced the scientific
terms attract and repel—that is, at a time when students had already expressed these
meanings in familiar everyday language. There is some parallel here to the principle
within bilingual programs that suggests that learning should occur first in the mother
tongue as a basis to learning in the second language, but here the issue is one of regis¬
ter rather than language.

Stage 3: Teacher-Guided Reporting

Science educator Rosalind Driver (1983) makes the important point that “activity by
itself is not enough. It is the sense that is made of it that matters” (49). In teacher-
guided reporting, the teacher talks with the children to help them make sense of the
activities in which they have been engaged. Wegerif and Mercer (1996) suggest that
as children are encouraged and enabled “to clearly describe events, to account for out¬
comes and consolidate what they have learned in words,” they are helped to “under¬
stand and gain access to educated discourse” (53, emphasis added).
In the classroom example shown here, the overall aim of the teacher-guided
reporting was to extend children’s linguistic resources and focus on aspects of the spe¬
cific discourse of science. As the teacher expressed it to the children, “Now we’re try¬
ing to talk like scientists.” She also anticipated that the reporting stage would create a
context for students to “rehearse” language structures that were closer to written
discourse—that is, that were closer to the written end of the mode continuum.
In the text shown in Figure 3—1, Hannah is explaining what she learned. The
teacher’s role in guided reporting is of course crucial; the text provides an example of
how her interactions with individual students provided a scaffold for their attempts,
allowing for communication to proceed while giving the learners access to new ways of
expressing the meanings they wanted to make.

45
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Student Teacher

1 try to tell them what you learned . . .

OK ... (to Hannah) yes?

2 when I put/ when you put . . . when

you put a magnet ... on top of a
magnet and the north pole poles
are.
(7-second pause, Hannah is clearly
having difficulty expressing what she
wants to say)

3 yes yes you’re doing fine . . you put one

magnet on top of another . .

4 and and the north poles are together

er em the magnet . . . repels the
magnet er . . . the magnet and the
other magnet . . . sort of floats in the
air?

5 I think that was very well told. . . very

well told . . do you have anything to
add to that Charlene? (The teacher
invites other contributions, and then asks
Hannah to explain it again.)

6 now listen . . now Hannah explain

once more . . . alright Hannah . . .
excuse me everybody (regaining class’s
attention) . . listen again to her expla¬
nation

7 the two north poles are leaning

together and the magnet on the
bottom is repelling the magnet on top
so that the magnet on the top is sort
of. . . floating in the air

8 so that these two magnets are repelling

(said with emphasis) each other and . . .
(demonstrating) look at the force of it.

Figure 3—1. Teacher-Guided Reporting (2)

46
 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom

This interaction between .teacher and student is different in several small but
important respects from the traditional IRF pattern, which was discussed in Chapter
2. Typically, the IRF pattern occurs in fairly predictable ways, frequently involving a
question to which the teacher already knows the answer, followed by a student answer
(often brief)) and finally a teacher evaluation relating to the correctness (or otherwise)
of the answer. For the most part, teachers’ questions are often framed in ways that do
not allow for students to make extended responses (Dillon 1990). In contrast, in the
text shown in Figure 3—1, the interactions approximate more closely what occurs in
mother-tongue, adult-child interactions outside of the formal teaching context (see,
for example, Halliday 1975; Painter 1985).
During teacher-guided reporting, the teacher begins the exchange by inviting stu¬
dents to relate what they have learned, rather than with a known answer or display
question. In this way, the teacher sets up a context that allows the students to initiate
the specific topic of the exchange. As Ellis (1994) shows, when learners initiate what
they wish to talk about, language learning is facilitated because they enter the dis¬
course on their own terms, rather than responding to a specific request for information
from the teacher. In the text shown in Figure 3—1, the student takes on the role of
“expert.” Although the teacher is in control of the knowledge associated with the
overall thematic development of the topic, the individual exchanges locate that con¬
trol in the student.
This increase in the equality of teacher and student roles leads Fiannah to produce
longer stretches of discourse than often occurs in classroom interaction. The teacher
can be described as “leading from behind.” At the same time, while the teacher follows
Hannah’s lead and accepts as a valid contribution the information the child gives, she
also recasts or reformulates what Hannah says, modeling alternative forms of language
that are more appropriate in the context of talking about science.
From the perspective of second language learning, it as clear that teacher-guided
reporting encourages learner language to be “pushed.” Hannah is going beyond what
is unproblematic for her, but, because she is allowed a second attempt, she has an addi¬
tional opportunity for comprehensible output (see Chapter 2). Hannah’s second
attempt at her explanation is considerably less hesitant and syntactically more com¬
plete than her first, and it is produced this time without the help of the teacher. As I
discussed in Chapter 1, Vygotsky (1978) suggests that learning occurs, with support
from those more expert, at the learner’s zone of proximal development—that is, at the
“outer edges” of a learner’s current abilities. In Turn 2, Hannah appears to have
reached her own zone of proximal development for this task, since she hesitates for a
considerable time and can presumably go no further alone. The recasting and support
she receives from the teacher (Turn 3) is precisely timed for learning to occur and to
assist Hannah to continue with what she wants to say.
As this text illustrates, the reporting context also gives students opportunities to
produce longer stretches of discourse that are more written-like than those that
occurred in the small-group work. Often this required the teacher to increase wait

47
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

time, on occasions for as long as eight seconds. Research suggests that when teachers
ask questions of students, they typically wait one second or less for the students to
begin a reply, but that when teachers wait for three or more seconds, there are signif¬
icant changes in student use of language and in the attitudes and expectations of both
students and teachers (Rowe 1986). It would seem likely that increased wait time is
even more important for students who are formulating responses in a language they do
not fully control. Perhaps equally important, we can see from these interactions that
students are able to complete what they want to say successfully: they are positioned
as successful interactants and learners. In addition, since it is the immediate need of
the learner that is influencing to a large extent the teacher’s choice of actual wording,
it seems likely that this wording will be more salient to the learner—more likely to be
taken note of—than if it had occurred in a context that was less immediate.
Another significant mode shift occurred toward the end of most reporting ses¬
sions, where the teacher used children’s personal knowledge to show how generaliza¬
tions might be generated. For example, her questions at this point included:

Can you see something in common with all these experiences?

What’s the same about all these experiments1

Such questions require the students to do more than simply produce a personal
recount of what they did; they must now express their learning in terms of generaliza¬
tions. Note how in the examples below, the children no longer mention themselves in
the discourse:

the north pole of the magnet sticks . . attracts . the second magnet. the south pole of the second magnet,
if you put the south and north together then they will. . attract but if you put north and north or south
and south . together . . they won’t stick . attract.

The teacher-guided reporting stage, then, both in the way language is used and in the
ways that children are encouraged to generalize from their learning, serves to create a
bridge for learners between personal ways of understanding a phenomenon and everyday
language, and the broader concepts and language associated with the science curriculum.

Stage 4: Journal Writing

After the students had taken part in the reporting session, they wrote a response in their
journals to the question, What have you learned?” These responses later served as a
source of information in the writing of more formal reports about magnets. What is par¬
ticularly significant is that these journals indicated that the talk with the teacher had
influenced the way the students wrote: the students’ writing reflected wordings that
they had used in interaction with the teacher, or that had been part of the teacher’s
recasting. This was particularly evident when the students themselves had had oppor¬
tunity to reformulate their own talk. Here, for example, is what Hannah wrote:

48
 From Speaking to Writing in the Content Classroom

I found it very interesting that when you stuck at least 8 paddle pop sticks in a piece
of polystyrene, and then put a magnet with the North and South pole in the oval and
put another magnet with the north and south pole on top, the magnet on the bottom
will repel the magnet on the top and the magnet on the top would look like it is float¬
ing in the air.

And here is an excerpt from the journal writing of a student who had listened to the
talk between Hannah and the teacher. The conversation influenced her writing too.

The thing made out of polystyrene with paddle pop sticks, one group put one magnet
facing north and another magnet on top facing north as well and they repelled each
other. It looked like the top magnet was floating up in the air.

In Summary

While this teacher s program illustrates the value of learning by doing (especially for
second language learners where concrete experiences help make language compre¬
hensible), it also illustrates the critical role of teacher-student talk in children’s learn¬
ing and language development. Regular teacher-guided reporting is one way of
providing an authentic and meaningful context for students to develop the more aca¬
demic registers of school.
We can also see that it is not simply the linguistic features of language itself that
affect students’ comprehension (for example the simplicity or otherwise of the gram¬
matical structures), but also the previous knowledge they bring to the new language
they are hearing. Note that in this classroom the new language introduced by the
teacher occurred after students had already developed some understanding of key con¬
cepts through the small-group work, and so new language was more readily inter-
pretable by the students. What preceded this new language—in this case the learning
that the students had gained through their participation in the small-group work—was
therefore an important factor in students’ understanding of it and their ultimate abil¬
ity to use it.
One implication of this for teaching is that language that would normally be beyond
students’ comprehension is much more likely to be understood when students can bring
their experiences and understandings as a basis for interpretation. This broad principle is
illustrated at other points in this book, in particular in the chapters on reading and lis¬
tening. In the words of Wong-Fillmore (1985) at the beginning of this chapter, written in
relation to her study of kindergarten ESL learners, “prior experiences serve as the con¬
texts within which the language being used is to be understood” (31).
This overall sequence of activities also presents a challenge to more traditional
ways of sequencing teaching and learning activities in the second language classroom,
where a new topic very often begins with the pre-teaching of vocabulary or a gram¬
matical structure. While this approach may certainly be appropriate at times, it is
worth remembering that it is underpinned by the notion that learners must first “learn”

49
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

language before they can “use” it. As we have seen, however, ESL learners must from
the outset use their second language for curriculum learning, and they need many con¬
texts in which they can do this. In this class, students used their current language
resources at the beginning of the unit while the focus on new language occurred at
later stages, a sequence that allowed for students to build on their existing under¬
standings and language, and to link old learning with new. In effect, they moved suc¬
cessfully toward, the language of the curriculum, throughout the unit of work, rather
than being expected to master it prior to their learning of science.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Cummins, J. 2000. “Language Proficiency in Academic Contexts.” Chapter 3 in Language,
Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire, ed. J. Cummins. Clevedon, UK:
Multilingual Matters.

Edwards, D., and Mercer, N. 1987. “Ritual and Principle." Chapter 6 in Common Knowledge:
The Development of Understanding in the Classroom, ed. D. Edwards and N. Mercer. Lon¬
don: Methuen.

GIBBONS, P 2001. “Learning a New Register in a Second Language.” In English Language Teach-
mg in Its Social Context, ed. Candlin C. and N. Mercer. London: Routledge.

HALLIDAY, M. 1993. “Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning.” Linguistics and Educa¬

tion 5: 93-116.

MARTIN, J. 1984. “Language, Register and Genre.” In Children Writing: Study Guide, ed. F.
Christie. Geelong, Victoria, AU: Deakin LJniversity Press.

50
 4
Writing in a Second Language
Across the Curriculum
An Integrated Approach

To be alert to the ways one’s language works for creat-

ing and organizing meaning is to be conscious of how
to manipulate and use it. Frances Christie, “The
Changing Face of Literacy”

Changing Expectations

Literacy in today’s world is a very different thing from literacy as it was understood in
the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century. At the begin¬
ning of the nineteenth century, literacy was valued largely because it taught the capac¬
ity to read the Bible and other improving works, and many children, once they had left
school, were required to do little more than write their name. As late as the 1930s, the
level of literacy required was still quite minimal, and was represented by the capacity
to read and copy simple passages and to write an occasional short text, such as a let¬
ter or a passage on a given topic (Christie 1990).
By contrast, the contemporary world in the early part of the twenty-first century
demands a level of sophistication in literacy skills greater than ever before, and “those
who do not possess considerable literacy will be effectively ‘locked out’ from so much
of the knowledge, information and ideas that are part of the culture of the society”
(Christie 1990, 20). In addition, those leaving school without an appropriate level of
literacy will be competing for a rapidly diminishing pool of unskilled jobs; as Christie
points out, the relationship between illiteracy, social alienation, and poverty is too
acute to be ignored. Today’s children are entering a world in which they will need to
be able to read and think critically, to live and work in intercultural contexts, to solve
new kinds of problems, and to be flexible in ever-changing work contexts; in short, to
make informed decisions about their own lives and their role in a multicultural soci¬
ety. We cannot opt out of the Western print world and remain active participants in
society.

51
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Among those who are potentially disadvantaged because of difficulties in learning

to control written English are those who are learning it as a second language. This is
particularly likely when learners have not previously developed literacy skills in their
mother tongue (Cummins 1996). This chapter discusses some of the difficulties that
ESL students may have in learning to write in English, and it suggests a teaching cycle
that models and makes explicit some of the major forms of writing, or text types, used
in school.

Learning to Write in a Second Language

First, drawing on your knowledge of your own students, consider in general terms some
of the characteristics of good writers and less effective writers. Effective writers are
likely to think about and plan their writing, at least in a general way, before they begin.
They understand that writing is a recursive process—that writers continually revise
and edit at all stages of the writing process, from first draft to final product. They are
also able to anticipate reader problems. For example, they make clear what reference
words such as he and she refer to. They are aware of the linguistic differences between
writing and speaking (such as those discussed in Chapter 2), and know that written
language is not just speech written down. And they understand how to organize the
ideas and writing of the text as a whole. By contrast, less effective writers probably do
none of these things. They may focus primarily on the mechanics of writing, such as
the spelling, and are overly concerned with “correctness.” As a result, they may lack
confidence to write at length or in new ways. They tend not to plan at a whole-text
level, and they are less able to anticipate the language and content information that a
reader will require in order to fully understand their writing. Their writing tends to
sound like “speech written down,” and they probably have difficulty in revising and
editing their own work.
Young students learning to write in their second language have even more to learn
about writing. Literacy teaching in Western schools usually presupposes that children
have already developed spoken language skills in the relevant language, and have
internalized considerable understandings about how to use the language. But this may
not be the case for ESL students. Trying to grasp concepts of print-—such as sound-
symbol relationships, directionality, and the notion that written symbols are not arbi¬
trary but fixed—is obviously much more difficult in a language in which you are not
strong. ESL students are also less likely to be familiar with the particular organizational
structure of different kinds of writing, and with the grammatical structures of English.
Some may be faced with learning a new script or alphabet system. In the next section
we’ll look at some of the types of writing that are common in school, and consider
some of the cultural and linguistic knowledge that is needed in order to produce these
forms successfully.

52
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing

Different forms of literary writing are often referred to as genres, such as poems, plays,
or novels, and these general distinctions are often further categorized: adventure nov¬
els, detective novels, romance novels, and so on. However, the word has also been used
with a much broader meaning, to refer to the range of ways in which things get done in
a particular society or culture (Martin 1989; Christie 1990). Under this broader defini¬
tion, the notion of genre would encompass things as diverse as the TV news, a marriage
service, a game show, a lesson, a joke, a telephone conversation with a friend, a news¬
paper report, or a set of written instructions. Every genre has a number of characteris¬
tics that make it different from other genres: a genre has a specific purpose; a particular
overall structure; specific linguistic features; and is shared by members of the culture.
Most important, members of the culture recognize it as a genre (even though they prob¬
ably dont use the term!). Let’s look briefly at each of these characteristics in turn.

A Specific Purpose

Each of the examples just listed has a specific social purpose or goal—to give informa¬
tion about the current news, for people to be married, to provide amusement, to teach
students, and so on. This social purpose is reflected in the way that the genre is struc¬
tured. A set of instructions, such as a recipe, which is intended to tell someone how to
do something, will be organized in sequence, so that each step follows from the one
before. Genres, then, are goal-oriented.

A Particular Overall Structure

Every genre has a particular structure. For example, a news program usually begins
with the most important and recent news, which may often include reports on inter¬
national events; goes on to less important, domestic, or local news; and concludes with
a sport’s review and the weather forecast. If a news program started with a minor piece
of news, or with the weather forecast, it would be unexpected. Similarly, if a joke
started with the punch line, we would probably no longer consider it a joke.

Specific Linguistic Features

Every genre has particular linguistic features in common with, or very similar to, other
genres of the same type. For example, most newspaper reports are likely to make use
of the past tense, to name particular people and events, and to say when the particu¬
lar event took place. They are also likely to include a quotation or two from key par¬
ticipants in the event. Sets of instructions will contain action verbs, and often make
use of the imperative. My set of computer instructions, for example, contains the verbs
click, drag, open, type, use, insert, shut down, and connect, and it includes sentences like
“Type what you want to find and click ‘Search.’”

53
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Shared by Members of the Culture

Genres are cultural, and though similar social purposes (such as writing a business let'
ter) are carried out in many cultures, the way of doing it may look very different from
culture to culture. As Chapter 1 pointed out, knowing the context of culture is a part
of being able to understand and use language appropriately. Some years ago I received
a letter from overseas that began:

I am immensely delighted and profoundly honoured to send you this letter. Please
accept my deepest esteem, my warmest, kindest regards, and sincerest wishes of con¬
stant happiness, good health, and ever-increasing prosperity and success in all your
endeavours . . .

Four paragraphs later it concluded:

Deeply grateful to you for each second you have so graciously spent reading my letter.
Please do accept once more my profoundest esteem, deepest thanks for your gracious
attention and consideration, and my most genuinely sincere wishes of constant hap¬
piness, success, peace, and prosperity, now and in the future.

The writer was requesting a copy of a hook. The letter was completely accurate in
terms of the grammar, but in terms of how it would be judged by a writer from an
English-speaking country, the language sounds excessively flowery, ornate, and even
servile. In the writer’s culture, however, such language is entirely appropriate, whereas
the kinds of request letters that someone growing up in an Anglo-Saxon culture might
write would he seen as very impolite and abrupt. Similarly, though all cultures have
ways of greeting, these ways need to be learned. We may greet each other with a sim¬
ple, “Hi, how are you?” In some cultures, however, you would be thought very impo¬
lite if you did not first ask after each of the other person’s family members. So, more
than just correct grammar is involved here. What learners must also know is the most
appropriate language to use and the most appropriate ways to get things done. For lan¬
guage teaching purposes, “a useful way of viewing a culture is in terms ... of its pur¬
poseful activities” (Painter 1988). Learning a second language thus means learning the
different kinds of spoken and written genres needed to participate in the second lan¬
guage culture.

The Text Types of School

A number of written genres associated with learning in school have been identified by a
group of linguists working in Sydney, including, among many others, Jim Martin, Joan
Rothery, Frances Christie, Beverley Derewianka, and Jenny Hammond. These genres
include recounts, narratives, reports, procedures, arguments, discussions, and explana¬
tions. (For a detailed description of these, see Derewianka 1990.) In this book I will use
the term text types to refer specifically to these genres, in order to differentiate them from

54
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

the wider range of genres used outside school. One of the commonest text types that chih
dren are expected to use early on in their school life (and, ironically, probably one of the
most complex) is the narrative. Let’s look at some of its specific characteristics.
Narratives, like all text types, have a purpose, which may be to entertain or per¬
haps to teach (as fables do). They also have a particular organizational structure, which
is most typically displayed in traditional stories. First, there is an orientation, the pur¬
pose of which is to set the scene, introduce the characters, and say when and where
the narrative is set. Then there are a number of events, which lead to some kind of
problem, sometimes referred to as a complication. Finally, the problem is resolved in the
final part of the story, the resolution. Figure 4-1 contains a very shortened version of
the story of Jack and Beanstalk, which illustrates how each of these stages is integral
to the story.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack, who lived Orientation:
with his mother in a small village. They were very poor sets the scene, gives
and their only possession was a cow, which gave them details of who, when,
milk, and an old axe, which hung on the wall of their where.
house.

One day his mother said to Jack, “We are so poor that we Events:
must sell the cow. You must take it to market and sell it relates a number of
to buy food.” events in sequence.
So Jack took the cow and set off to market. On his
way there he met an old man who offered to exchange
Jack’s cow for some beans. Jack said, “My mother will be
very angry with me if I don’t take back money. We need
to buy food.”
“Don’t worry,” replied the old man. “These are no
ordinary beans. They are magic beans, and they will
bring you good luck!”
Jack felt sorry for the old man, for he looked even
poorer than Jack, and so he agreed to exchange the cow
for the magic beans.
“You are a kind boy,” said the old man, “and you will
be well rewarded.”
When he got home and told his mother what he had
done, she was very angry.

Figure 4-1. Organizational Structure of a Narrative (continued)

55
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

“You stupid boy,” she shouted. “You have sold our

most valuable possession for a handful of beans.” And
she threw the beans out of the window.
The next day, when Jack woke up, there, in the
garden, where his mother had thrown the beans, was a
huge beanstalk. It was as thick as a tree and so tall it
seemed to go right up into the sky. Jack stared and stared
at the beanstalk, and remembered the old man’s words.
Taking his axe, he began to climb up the beanstalk. Up
and up he climbed. For many hours he kept climbing
until, at last, he could see the top of the beanstalk. Right
at the top of the beanstalk, asleep on the ground, was a
huge, ugly giant. And in front of him lay a heap of treas¬
ure. There were gold and silver coins, and piles of pre¬
cious jewels. Very quietly, so as not to wake the giant, Jack
started to fill his coat pockets with the giant’s treasure.

Just as Jack had taken all he could carry, the giant opened Complication:
one eye and saw Jack. “Who are you?” he roared. He states the problem.
opened the other eye, and then he stood up. Jack could
hardly see his head it was so far away. He turned and ran
and started to climb down the beanstalk as fast as he
could. The giant strode after him, and Jack felt sure he
was about to die!

But as the giant was about to reach down and grab Jack, Resolution:
Jack remembered the axe. He swung it backwards and relates how the problem
then, as hard as he could, he chopped into the beanstalk is solved.
just above his head. Again and again he chopped until,
at last, the top of the beanstalk crashed down out of the
sky, carrying the giant with it. With a loud roar he
disappeared and fell to earth. And Jack climbed safely
down the beanstalk carrying enough jewels to look after
his mother and himself for the rest of his life.

Figure 4-L Organizational Structure of a Narrative (continued)

There are also typical linguistic features common to narratives:

• They are sequenced in time, and this is often signaled by the conjunctions or
connectives that are used. In the beanstalk story, the time connectives that
sequence events include once upon a time, one day, when, the next day, for many
hours, at last, and.

56
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

• They usually use the past tense.

They use many action verbs that describe what people do. In the beanstalk
story, the action verbs include took, met, threw, woke, climbed, stood, turned, ran,
strode, chopped, swung, crashed, disappeared.
• They often contain dialogue, and so they also contain “saying” verbs that
explain how people speak: said, replied, shouted, roared.

If you compare the beanstalk narrative above to another text type, such as a set of
written instructions, it is clear that each type is distinctive: they have different pur¬
poses, a different overall structure, different ways of organizing or linking ideas, and
different linguistic features. For teacher reference, the key features of some of the
major text types of school are summarized in Figure 4-2, under the headings purpose,
organizational structure, connectives (linking words), and other language features. As the
next part of the chapter will demonstrate, being aware of the most important linguis¬
tic features of some of the text types of school will help you make these explicit to stu¬
dents, and will help guide your assessment. Note though that these linguistic features
are not intended to he passed directly onto students as they stand: a later section of
this chapter discusses a suggested process for developing a range of text types with
learners.

Explicit Teaching About Writing

There is considerable debate at the current time around the notion of “explicit” teach¬
ing. This implies a very different approach to the teaching of writing than that embod¬
ied in progressive “process” approaches of the 1970s and 1980s.
Process approaches, unlike the more traditional approaches that preceded them,
put the learner at the center of the learning process. In relation to writing, the major
themes within this approach are that children learn to write most effectively when
they are encouraged to start with their own expressive language, that “meaning” is
more important than “form,” and that writing should take place frequently and within
a context that provides “real” audiences for writing (see, for example Graves 1983;
Cambourne 1988). A particular feature of this approach is the importance placed on
the processes of learning. An underlying assumption in many classrooms has been that,
given the right classroom environment and a climate that expects a quantity of writ¬
ing across a range of purposes and forms, children will automatically learn to write on
a variety of subjects and in many forms, just as they learned to speak without formal
instruction.
While the move away from the traditional teacher-centered classroom has been
generally welcomed, there have been a number of critiques of progressive approaches,
particularly in relation to minority students or those less familiar with the language
of school. Many ESL teachers in particular have argued for more formal instruction in
the structures of language and the conventions of writing. While acknowledging the
strengths of the progressive movement in developing approaches that recognize the

57
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

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58
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

importance ot interesting and interactive educational settings, it has been argued that
such approaches also tend to reinforce existing social inequities, since what is expected
of learners is often not made explicit (Martin 1986, 1989; Martin, Christie, and Roth-
ery 1987; Delpit 1988; Boomer 1989). Susan Feez (1985), writing about the Australian
context, has argued:

in many respects . . . progressive approaches have reinforced the inequalities of access

which are characteristic of older, traditional pedagogies. It is simply that in progressive
pedagogies, the way these inequalities are perpetuated becomes invisible. Learners’
individuality and freedom may be more highly valued in progressive classrooms, but
during and at the end of their courses of study learners are still assessed against the
standards of the dominant culture . . . although classrooms are more pleasant, what is
actually expected of learners in order for them to be successful is not made explicit
. . . progressive classrooms tend to reinforce existing social inequalities of opportunity
because it seems that it is the learner rather than the educational institution, who is
to be blamed for failure in such benevolent and rich learning environments. (9)

Lisa Delpit (1988), writing in the context of the education of African American
students in the United States, has also argued that the conventions of writing must be
explicitly taught, and that they will not simply be picked up by students for whom the
language and assumptions of the school are unfamiliar. As she argues, if you are not
already a participant in the dominant culture, being told explicitly the rules of that cul¬
ture makes acquiring power easier. As Delpit notes, entering a new culture is easier,
both psychologically and pragmatically, if information about the appropriateness of
behavior is made explicit to those outside the culture, rather than conveyed as implicit
codes, as it would be to those who are members of the community by birth. Delpit con¬
cludes, “Unless one has the leisure of a lifetime of immersion to learn them, explicit
presentation makes learning immeasurably easier” (283). She explains:

Some children come to school with more accoutrements of the culture of power
already in place—“cultural capital” as some critical theorists refer to it—some with
less. Many liberal educators hold that the primary goal for education is for children to
become autonomous, to develop fully while they are in the classroom setting without
having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them. This is a very reasonable goal
for people whose children are already participants in the culture of power and who
have internalized its codes. But parents who don’t function within that culture often
want something else. It’s not that they disagree with the former aim, it’s just that they
want something more. They want to ensure that the school provides their children
with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes
that will allow them success in the larger society. (285)

Delpit, like Feez, suggests that where educational standards are not accorded a
high priority for minority students, then—no matter how friendly, egalitarian, and
caring the environment—classrooms may still work against students, even though in

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

a benign and less obvious way. While some teachers may feel uncomfortable about
teaching in a way that seems to exhibit their power in the classroom, this very lack of
explicitness, whether it is about rules of conduct or forms of writing, may actually pre-
vent some students from achieving educational success. One clear implication of this
argument is that the educational curriculum must include explicit teaching of those
forms of language that will enable students to succeed in school and actively partici-
pate in the dominant community.
Thus, whereas progressive theorists have argued for an understanding of writing
through a focus on personal growth and process, proponents of explicit teaching have
argued for an understanding of the linguistic nature of texts as they are produced
within social contexts and for various purposes. Further, they argue that educators
have a responsibility to intervene in the learning process (Martin, Christie, and Roth'
ery 1987; Kalantzis, Cope, Noble, and Poynting 1991).
So what does it mean to teach “explicitly”? Let’s begin with what it doesn’t mean!
It doesn’t mean a return to the teaching of traditional grammar, and to meaningless
drills and exercises devoid of functional and communicative purpose. Nor does it mean
that “grammar” is taught separately from the authentic use of language. Neither does
it mean a breaking up of language into its component parts of speech, or a fragmenta-
tion of the timetable into spelling, dictation, composition, and so on, or a separation
of the macro'skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. It does mean that stu-
dents are encouraged to reflect on how language is used for a range of purposes and
with a range of audiences, and that teachers focus explicitly on those aspects of lan¬
guage that enable students to do this. Explicit teaching is related to real-life use, so
that understanding about language is developed in the context of actual language use.
It aims to foster active involvement in learning, independence in writing, and the abil¬
ity to critique the ways that language is used in authentic contexts, such as the ways it
is used to persuade and control.

The Curriculum Cycle

Let’s turn now to what these principles might look like in the classroom. Derewianka
(1990) and others involved in the “genre” movement in Australia have identified four
stages (named the Curriculum Cycle) through which a particular text type can be
made explicit to students. These four stages of the Curriculum Cycle have come to be
known as building up the field, modeling the text type, joint construction, and independent
writing. Each of these stages has a particular teaching purpose:

• Stage 1: Building the Field. In this stage the aim is to make sure that your stu¬
dents have enough background knowledge of the topic to be able to write about
it. The focus here is primarily on the content or information of the text. At this
stage, children are a long way from writing a text themselves, and activities will
involve speaking, listening, reading, information gathering, note taking, and
reading.

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 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

Stage 2: Modeling the Text Type. In this stage the aim is for students to become
familiar with the purpose, overall structure, and linguistic features of the type
of text they are going to write. The focus here is therefore on the form and
function of the particular text type that the students are going to write.
Stage 3. Joint Construction. Here the teacher and students write a text together,
so that students can see how the text is written. The focus here is on illustrat-
ing the process of writing a text, considering both the content and the
language.
• Stage 4: Independent Writing. At this stage students write their own text.

It s important to recognize that this Curriculum Cycle may take several weeks or
longer to go through and may be the overall framework for an entire topic. It is not a
single lesson!
Here are some classroom activities that you might find useful for each of the
stages. Not all activities will be appropriate for all ages, and they also are not all appro-
priate for use in the teaching of every text type. In addition, from your general teach¬
ing experience you can no doubt think of other language-focused activities and ways
of developing the topic. However, the activities suggested here illustrate how this
approach to writing integrates speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and integrates
language with curriculum content.
As an example, let’s imagine that you want to help children write a report—that
is, a factual account of what something is (or was) like. First, you need to make a deci¬
sion about what curriculum topic would require students to write a report. (In this
case, let’s say dinosaurs.) Always be sure to consider what you have already planned to
teach (in any curriculum area). It’s important that the Curriculum Cycle should be
based on your regular curriculum—it shouldn’t be seen as an “add-on” to what you
would normally be teaching.

Stage 1: Building Knowledge of the Topic

The aim here is to build up background knowledge, and so the focus is primarily on
the “content” of the topic. Since the primary purpose of this stage is to collect infor¬
mation, some of the activities could be carried out by groups of students in their
mother tongue, although they will need to use English to share the information with
others. A useful form of classroom organization for a number of the activities discussed
here is an expert/home grouping, described in Chapter 2. This kind of organization
involves note-taking, listening, speaking, and reading, and it provides a genuine need
for authentic communication. While collaborative learning strategies are important
for all children, they offer to ESL children a range of situations in which they are
exposed to and learn to use subject-specific language.
Again, the expert/home grouping strategy for collaborative learning depends on
groups of children holding different information from others in the class. You can vary
how you do this, but as a general principle, different groups of students become

61
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

“expert” in a different aspect of the topic during a particular activity. In this example,
groups of four to six could choose to carry out research on a particular dinosaur. Once
they have become “experts,” the students regroup so that the home group contains one
student from each of the “expert” groups. The experts’ job is to share what they have
learned with the rest of the group.
Here are some ways to build up a shared knowledge of the topic. They are in no
particular order but are simply examples of activities that you could use. As you can
see, an important aspect of this stage is that it involves a lot of speaking, listening, and
reading, and develops a range of research skills.

• Build up a semantic web of students’ current knowledge of the topic, teaching

new vocabulary as appropriate.
• Use wallpapering to collect ideas based on students’ current knowledge.
• Gather a list of questions from the children of things they would like to find out
about (e.g., why did the dinosaurs disappear?). For beginner ESL students, this
also models the structure of question forms.
• Read about the topic with students using shared reading or big books. This could
include both nonfiction and fiction texts. If you use both kinds, there is an oppor¬
tunity to discuss with students the different purposes of each. With a narrative
text you could also talk about what is fact and what is fiction, and ask children
what facts (if any) they have learned about dinosaurs from the story.
• Use pictures to elicit or teach vocabulary. You could also get students to match
labels to simple line drawings, introducing more technical vocabulary such as
horns, jaws, curved teeth, crest, spine, thumb claw, scaly skin, tail, plates, spikes.
• Develop a word wall/word bank about the topic, where technical vocabulary
can be displayed.
• Use jigsaw listening to extend the children’s knowledge base. Each group could
listen to audiotaped information about a different dinosaur, or a different the¬
ory about why they disappeared. They could make notes and later share the
information with the rest of the class, either in groups or with the whole class.
• Use technological resources (the Internet is a wonderful resource for many top¬
ics) to access additional information. Here is a context where you could again
use a home/expert grouping.
• Get the students to interview an expert in the field. They could write a letter
inviting an expert into the classroom and prepare questions to ask.
• Use a picture and sentence matching game. Get younger or beginning ESL
children to match pictures and sentences about dinosaurs (e.g., Stegosaurus had
a row of plates on its back and Diplodocus was the longest of all the dinosaurs). You
could turn this into a barrier game whereby Student A reads out a sentence—
It has a row of plates on its back—and Student B points to the appropriate
picture.

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 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

Use barrier games such as Find the Difference to describe the appearance of
dinosaurs, such as by finding the differences between Stegosaurus and Tricer-
atops. (See Figure 4-3.)
Use the topic to develop library skills by visiting the library and getting the stu-
dents to suggest where they might find the specific information they are look-
ing for.

63
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

• Watch a video and provide an information grid for pairs of children to com-
plete as they watch. Or you could use two sets of questions, with one half of the
class answering one set, in pairs, and the other half answering the other set, in
pairs. Later, pairs from each half could form groups of four and share their
information.
• Visit a museum and give different groups of children different questions to
research. Children would later share information in the expert/home groups as
mentioned earlier.
• As an ongoing activity during this stage, build up an information grid with the
class that summarizes the information the students have gathered. This could
be formed on a large sheet of paper and displayed on the wall. This is a “work¬
ing document,” not an end in itself, so both you and the students can add to it
as they discover more information. Encourage children to do this whenever
they learn something new. Alternatively, children can also develop their own
information grids, individually, in pairs, or in a group. In the following stages,
these information summaries will be very important.
• Use the topic to practice or introduce grammar structures that are particularly
meaningful to the topic. For example, although scientists know a great deal
about dinosaurs, there is much that is still speculative. We don’t know for sure
why dinosaurs became extinct, nor why they grew so large. Very recent evi¬
dence suggests that they may have been warm-blooded. It is important for
learners to be able to express these uncertainties, and this would be a mean¬
ingful context in which to introduce or remind students about how to use
modality, the way in which speakers express degrees of likelihood or probability
(e.g., may be, perhaps, might, could be), or degrees of usuality (e.g., sometimes,
often, frequently). Ways of expressing probability could form a word bank (e.g.,
might have been, may have been, possibly, probably, perhaps, it is possible that) from
which students can construct sentences:

Perhaps dinosaurs disappeared because the climate changed.

Dinosaurs might have disappeared because the climate changed.
They probably communicated with their eyes and the sounds they made.
They may have been warm-blooded.

Stage 2: Modeling the Text

This stage aims to build up students’ understandings of the purpose, overall structure,
and language features of the particular text type the class is focusing on. You should
choose a text that is similar to the one you will use in the next stage (joint construc¬
tion) and to the one that students will eventually write themselves. Model texts may
be commercially produced, teacher-written, or texts written previously by other stu¬
dents. It is helpful to have this model text on an overhead or a large sheet of paper, so

64
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

that you can talk about it as a class more easily. For our example, you would choose a
short report about dinosaurs, or about a particular dinosaur.
During this stage, introduce some meta-language—language to talk about
language to the students as it is needed. Words like connectives, organizational struc-
ture, text type, verbs, and tense will make it easier for you to talk about the key features,
and for the students to self-evaluate their own texts later. Contrary to much debate
about the place of the teaching of “grammar,” research in Australia has shown that stu¬
dents do not have difficulty in understanding these concepts, and that providing a
label helps make explicit key aspects of writing (Williams 1999). The principle here, of
course, is that these grammatical terms are taught in the context of language use. Here
are some steps to follow.

• Read and show the model report to the students, and discuss with them its pur¬
pose—to present factual information on a topic. (If students are already famil¬
iar with narratives, you could discuss with them the difference between the
purposes of a narrative and of a report.)
• Draw attention to the organizational structure or “shape” of the text, and the
function of each stage (e.g., reports begin with a general statement, the purpose
of which is to locate what is being talked about in the broader scheme of things,
and the rest of the report consists of facts about various aspects of the subject).
Then focus on any grammatical structures and vocabulary that are important
in the text. You may want to focus on modality, as discussed earlier, or on the
verbs be and have, since these are very common in information reports. (Note,
however, that here they will be used in the past tense since we are referring to
things no longer in existence.) Alternatively, you might prefer to let the stu¬
dents themselves decide on these features, in which case you will need to pro¬
vide careful guidance and questioning, and the students will probably need to
examine several examples of the same text type.
• Students in pairs do a text reconstruction of part of the report, where they
sequence jumbled sentences into a coherent text. Alternately, you could mix
up the sentences from two reports so that students must first sort out which
sentence belongs to which report, and then sequence them.
• Use a dictogloss to provide another model of the text type. The content of this
should be taken from the current topic (e.g., you could choose a text that
describes one of the dinosaurs the children are researching). In turn, this will
also be a source of further information.
• Use the model text as a cloze exercise, making the “gaps” according to the
grammatical features or vocabulary you are focusing on. Children will also
enjoy using a monster cloze or a vanishing cloze.
• Use part of the model text as a running dictation.
• Once the students have a clear idea of the characteristics of a report (or what¬
ever text type you are focusing on), remind them of these characteristics and

65
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

write them up as a chart that can be displayed on the wall. (Figure 4-2 may be
useful as teacher reference here, but note that this diagram is not intended for
direct student use.)

Stage 3: Joint Construction

At this stage, students are ready to think about writing, although they will not yet be
writing alone. The teacher or students decide on the topic they will write about, but
again it should be an example of the same text type, such as a report on one type of
dinosaur. To ensure that students have sufficient background knowledge, encourage
them to draw on the information grid the class developed in Stage 1.
It will help you to understand the teaching purpose of this stage if you return to
Chapter 1 and the example of Nigel talking with his parents. There we saw how the
story Nigel told was jointly constructed—while the meanings were initiated by Nigel,
his parents helped with the wording. This is a natural process, and for most adults an
intuitive one. The joint construction stage of writing mirrors the same process. The
students give suggestions and contribute ideas while the teacher scribes, and together
the teacher and students discuss how the writing can be improved. Throughout the
process, the teacher and students constantly reread together what they have written,
with the teacher asking questions like these:

What do we need to start with?

Is that the best way to say it?
Can anyone think of a better word than that?
Is this all OK now? Can anyone see anything that needs fixing up?

You should also remind students of the model texts they have looked at. For exam¬
ple, ask questions such as:

Can you remember what the other reports were like?

What do you think we should talk about next?

At this stage, teacher and students together discuss the overall structure of the
text, suggest more appropriate vocabulary, consider alternative ways of wording an
idea, and work on correcting grammatical mistakes, spelling, and punctuation. This is
a time when there can be an explicit focus on grammar, but, unlike the traditional
classroom, it occurs in functionally relevant ways—in the context of actual language
use, and at the point of need.
In the following excerpt, which is taken from a joint construction of an explanation
about how a telephone works, two students below talk about language. The excerpt
shows evidence of quite sophisticated understandings about using reference words.

We keep repeating “the exchange,” “the exchange,” “the exchange.”

66
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

Let’s put “it” instead.

But they won’t know what “it” is!
Yes they will ’cause we’ve already said it. (from Derewianka 1990, 59)

At the joint construction stage, then, the teacher encourages students to focus on
all aspects of writing. But this stage should also model the process of writing: as sug¬
gestions are made, the teacher will cross out, amend, and add words. Once this first
draft is complete, the teacher or a student can rewrite it on a large sheet of paper, and
it can remain in the classroom as an additional model text.
While the joint construction stage is teacher-guided, it should not be seen as
teacher-dominated. The teacher does not simply write her “own” text. Rather, her role
is to take up the ideas of the students, leading the discussion of any linguistic aspects
of the text that students are still learning to control. This is a very important part of
the curriculum cycle because it illustrates to students both the process of composing
text, and a product that is similar to what they will later write themselves.

Stage 4: Independent Writing

This is the final stage of the cycle, when students write their own texts. They can do
this writing individually or in pairs. For our example, they could choose a dinosaur to
write about (but not the same one as used in Stages 2 and 3). By now there has been
a considerable amount of scaffolding for the writing. Students have developed consid¬
erable background knowledge about the subject, are aware of the linguistic character¬
istics of the text type, and have jointly constructed a similar text. This preparation, or
scaffolding, for writing will help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills to be
able to write their own texts with confidence.
As students write, remind them about the process of writing: doing a first draft,
self-editing, discussing the draft with friends and later with the teacher, and finally pro¬
ducing a “published” text. The published texts can be displayed in the classroom or
made into a class book. If you photocopy a few of the students’ texts (with their per¬
mission) , they will also serve as useful models and resources for other classes.

A Scaffolding Approach to Writing

It is easy to see how the notion of scaffolding applies to this kind of teaching. At no
stage are learners expected to carry out alone a task with which they are not familiar,
yet at the same time they are constantly being “stretched” in their language develop¬
ment and expected to take responsibility for those tasks they are capable of doing
alone. At each stage there is systematic guidance and support until learners are able to
carry out the writing task for themselves. Consider how different this approach is to
the traditional one-off writing task, when students were expected to write a single and
final copy at one sitting, or some “process” approaches in which students were
expected to make their own choices about writing topic and bow to approach it. While

67
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

imagination and ownership are important concepts in teaching writing, they are insuf¬
ficient to ensure that all students, especially those less familiar with the language of
school, will learn to write in a broad range of contexts.

Using the Curriculum Cycle

The cycle will take you some time to complete. However, in the case of reports, for
example, not only will students learn how to write a report, but they will also learn a
lot about the topic (and thus develop particular knowledge in a curriculum area). As
well, they will practice the study skills of note taking and of locating, summarizing, and
reinterpreting information. The cycle includes plenty of opportunities for reading, lis¬
tening, and speaking, and you may decide to integrate it with focused teaching of these
skills. In addition, students will learn how to write, edit, and evaluate any similar text
that they might need to write at another time.
Of course, students will not know all there is to know about this text type after the
first use of the cycle. It should be repeated throughout the year, using appropriately
chosen material for the age of the students. However, as they become more familiar
with the particular text type, it probably won’t be necessary to continue to go through
Stages 2 and 3 in quite such detail.
It has sometimes been suggested that the cycle simply presents different text types as
a series of “recipes” that students are then expected to follow slavishly. Creativity and the
writer’s voice, it is argued, will be stifled. However, making rules and expectations explicit
to students does not limit their freedom and autonomy. On the contrary, it gives them the
tools to be creative and autonomous. Once students are aware of the conventions of any
of the text types, they will be able to manipulate them for their own purposes.
Good short story writers, for example, often don’t follow the overall structure dis¬
cussed earlier. They may begin with the resolution and narrate the story as a series of
flashbacks, or manipulate the sequence in a whole range of other ways. But it would
be foolish to suggest that good writers are unaware of traditional narrative writing;
indeed, it is precisely this awareness that allows them to exploit and manipulate their
writing in new ways, and to make conscious choices about how they write. We need to
reflect this in the classroom. If students are to have real choices about what and how
they write, they need to be shown what the range of options is. Otherwise, they may
simply remain with what they know, writing about a limited range of things in the same
way. And it is important to remember that the “rules” and conventions that govern
different types of writing have not been imposed by linguists, but simply describe what
these text types look like in the real world.

Scaffolding for Young Writers

You may feel that the discussion so far is more relevant to older students or those more
advanced in English. However, the same approach can be used with very young
students and those new to English, although the length of the text will be much

68
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

shorter. One of the simplest tex,t types to begin with is a personal recount. A recount
reconstructs past experience, and is a retelling of an activity or a sequence of events in
which the speaker or writer has been involved. A school excursion provides an ideal
context for developing recounts. For example, on the day of an excursion with her sec-
ond graders to visit a local dam and the surrounding countryside, one teacher brought
a camera and took photographs of the day. The children took field notes and made
sketches of what they saw. When they returned to school, they shared their observa¬
tions in the form of oral recounts. Later they relived the excursion through the pho-
tographs, and as each photo was discussed, the teacher helped the children talk about
what they had done, using the sequence of photographs as prompts of the day’s events:
we left school early in the morning; we got on the bus; we visited the national park; we had
our lunch; we visited the dam; and so on. After the oral discussion, the sequence of pho¬
tographs served as a prompt for the children’s own writing.
Many young writers rely on and then for sequencing recounts and narratives, so in
this class the teacher decided to model a broader range of connectives (later, next, after¬
wards, finally . . .). Students helped build up a word bank of these to draw on in their
own writing. (They can continue to add to word banks as they think of similar exam¬
ples themselves or come across them in their reading.) As Chapter 1 pointed out, as
far as possible teachers should try to have the range of learners in their class complete
the same or similar tasks—what will vary is the kind and degree of the scaffolding
teachers provide. For children at the early stages of writing in English, provide more
support, such as a simple organizational framework and some suggested connecting
words. You could also provide a list of some of the vocabulary they will need to use.
Here’s an example:

On_our class went to_.

First we visited_. We saw_there.
Then we went to_.
Next we visited_and saw_.
Afterwards we went to_and saw_.
Finally we got back on the bus and_.
We got back to school at_. It was fun!

Scaffolding for Children New to English

There are many other ways of scaffolding writing for learners very new to English. Here
are some other general ideas.

• Actively encourage writing in the first language. This reduces some of the frus¬
tration children often feel when they are unable to participate in classroom
tasks that they are well able to carry out in their mother tongue. If possible, pro¬
vide a translation on a facing page (perhaps with the help of a parent). Having

69
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

a bilingual account will not only help learners understand the English version,
hut allow them to display their literacy skills, which may be considerable. In
addition, bilingual texts allow native English-speaking children to see that En¬
glish is not the only language in which people can communicate.
• For a recount or a narrative, have learners draw a sequence of events or story
map and dictate what they want to say. Write this text for them, which they
can trace over or copy.
• Use picture sequencing with a group of students as a basis for a simple
narrative.
• Have learners match photos or pictures to simple sentences or labels, or use a
barrier game for picture and sentence matching like the one described in Stage 1
earlier.
• Use dialogue journals between yourself and the ESL learner, or between the ESL
learner and an English-speaking buddy. These are ongoing written conversations
where each partner writes a single short sentence responding to the other.
• Make jumbled sentences. Get learners to tell you a sentence about themselves,
something they have done, or something they like. Scribe it for them and then
get them to cut this up into single words. Learners rearrange the jumbled sen¬
tence, read it, and then rewrite it. If they are literate in their mother tongue,
get them to write an equivalent sentence in their mother tongue too.
• A variation on jumbled sentences is to write the same sentence on two strips
of card. Cut one into the individual words. Students place the matching word
on top of the uncut strip. This is useful for drawing attention to the shape of
words and to the way they are spelled.
• For learners who are not completely new to English, but who still need strong
support, provide them with an explicit framework for the kind of writing the
class is doing. This kind of explicit scaffolding means that students are able to
take part in the same tasks as the rest of the class-—as Chapter 1 pointed out,
it is the nature of the scaffolding, rather than the task itself, that changes.
Figure 4-4 is an example of how a fairly complex text type—a discussion—can
be scaffolded in this way.

Assessing Students’ Writing: What Their Texts Can Tell Us

There are a range of reasons for assessment. Among the most important of these is the
ongoing assessment teachers carry out to find out what their students are able to do.
Only if we know students’ current abilities can subsequent teaching be truly responsive,
and only then can we plan how to take students further. Put another way, and using the
Vygotskian idea of the zone of proximal development discussed in Chapter 1, we must
know what the learner is able to do alone before we know what to scaffold next. This
kind of assessment is not an extra item for which you must find additional time; it can
occur during any normal classroom teaching. Here is a suggestion about how to analyze

70
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

Title:_

What the discussion is about, and my opinion

The topic of this discussion is . . .

My opinion is that . . .

Arguments for

There are a number of reasons why I believe this.

1. First

2. In addition

3. Finally

Counterarguments (arguments against)

1. On the other hand, some people argue

2. In addition

3. They also say

Conclusion

However, my view is that . . .

because . . .

Figure 4-4- Discussion Framework (for students needing more scaffolding)

71
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

students’ writing to find out both what they are able to achieve and the areas in which
they need help. To do this you will need to look at a piece that represents what the
writer can do alone. It need not be their first draft, but it should not yet have been dis¬
cussed in a conference.
Here are two examples of narrative writing, both from ESL students. The first
comes from a student who is still in the early stages of English, and the second comes
from a younger child who is already fluent in spoken English. Take a moment to think
about what each writer knows, and what kind of help they need.

Text 1: turtle and wolf

One day the turtle out the river to find the food.
He go went the sun.
The sun very hot the turtle he want go back.
The turtle crying because he can’t go back, the wolf thought the turtle he think tur¬
tle was singing. The wolf said “you don’t singing to me I put you on the sun, Don t
worry I can get into my shell. “I threw you to the river.
“Don’t do that.”
The wolf threw turtle to the river. The turtle said “thank old mr wolf.

Text 2: Night
One night I was walking throgth the woods I heard something strange I didn’t know
what it was I looked I still didn’t know what it was I looking it was an owl he led me
to house he knocked on the door a which answer come little boy I might turn you into
a frog all my prisoners are hiding somewhere so you can’t escape if you try to they will
catch you so I will turn you into a which their are stairs but their are prisoners hiding
you can’not go up their because they have the stuf to turn you into a frog so I wouldn’t
try it she let me go I ran home as fast as I could I was home at last what happen I will
tell you in the morning then I went to bed.

What were your first reactions to the two texts? If you were to look only at sen¬
tence grammar, you would probably be more critical of Text 1 than of Text 2. Text 1
has many more grammatical mistakes, particularly in the use of verbs, and it is quite
clearly written by a second language learner. Text 2, despite the fact that it is written
with minimal punctuation, has a much closer control of standard grammar. However,
you may also feel that Text 1 is a more coherent piece: we can follow the story line,
and this is much harder to follow in Text 2.
Before you read further, look again at the discussion of the features of a narrative
discussed at the beginning of this chapter, and in Figure 4-2. Then consider the texts
again, this time thinking about the question framework in Figure 4-5 as you read.
These questions are designed to help you think in a systematic way about what you
are reading, and about what the student knows and can do, as well as to highlight future

72
 Writing in a Second Language Across the Curriculum

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73
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

learning needs. The framework takes a holistic and top-down view of writing, focusing
first on the overall meaning, then on the overall organization, the ways that sentences are
connected, sentence construction, and finally spelling and punctuation. Leaving spelling
and punctuation until last is not to suggest they are not important, simply that correcting
the spelling of a poor piece of writing results in a correctly spelled poor piece of writing—
the piece of writing itself is not substantially improved! When helping students with their
writing, spelling and punctuation must be considered in the final version, but only after
other more fundamental aspects of writing have been thought about first.
Your responses to these sets of questions may have given you a quite different per¬
spective on the two texts. For Text 1, you will probably have responded positively to
Questions 1, 2, and 3, and to some degree to 4. Your response to 5 and 7 will also prob¬
ably have been quite positive. It is only when we look at 6 that difficulties are evident.
So think about what that student can do, and what he knows about writing (and how
much of his ability to write would go unnoticed if sentence grammar were the sole
focus of the assessment). By contrast, Text 2 is actually much less comprehensible or
coherent, and compared to your assessment of Text 1, you probably found it in several
ways a far less successful text.
If you simplify and adapt the question framework, you can also share it with your
students, and demonstrate how they might use it to reflect, proofread, and evaluate
their own writing. Very often when asked to edit their writing, students focus almost
exclusively on spelling and punctuation because they are unaware of what else to look
at. Encouraging students to think more holistically about their writing will mean build¬
ing up a shared meta-language—for example, using terms such as text type, overall struc-
ture, and connectives. These can be introduced gradually and in context, and will help
students build up a language to talk about language, as well as draw their attention to
significant aspects of their writing.
An example of how the framework might be filled in for the writer of the first text
is included in Figure 4-6. A framework like this will help you keep an ongoing profile
of individual students’ writing development. Try to jot down comments as you are con¬
ferencing with students or reading their texts. Even if these notes are brief, they will
help you build up a clear idea of what kinds of texts your students are able to control,
and any linguistic difficulties they may be having. One teacher with whom I worked
developed a system of color-coding, using one color for indicating positive achieve¬
ments and another indicating the area where future teaching was needed.
An alternative way of using the framework is to use it to build up a class profile. To
assess how well a group of students is able to use a particular text type, write the names
of the students down the left-hand side and comment briefly on each one. You will
then be able to see what abilities and difficulties they have in common.
Although this kind of assessment is time-consuming, you will find that you get
faster the more you use it. It is also time well spent, because in reflecting on students’
writing in this way, you are able to better target your future teaching to specific stu¬
dent needs. In doing this you are also “individualizing” the program. This does not

74
 r-j
1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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75
Writing in a Second Language
Across
the Curriculum

Figure 4-6. Assessment of Text 1

 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

mean developing an individual program for every student, which for most busy teach-
ers is a practical impossibility, but it does mean that the classroom program will be as
responsive as possible to the individual needs indicated by the profile. Finally, the pro¬
file will indicate what students can achieve (as we saw in Text 1) as well as where they
have difficulties, and will be a useful basis for giving feedback to the students them¬
selves, to parents, and to other teachers.

In Summary

Here is one final comment about the approach to writing taken in this chapter. The
more time you have spent on the stages of the Curriculum Cycle, and the more
planned and responsive the scaffolding, the more likely it is that students will write
effectively, feel they have control over what they are writing, and gain confidence in
using written language. Both you and your students will feel proud of their achieve¬
ments. It is certainly preferable to spending endless time correcting mistakes in stu¬
dents’ writing because they have not had sufficient support earlier in the process.

Suggestions for Further Reading

DEREWIANKA, B. 1990. Exploring How Texts Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

MARTIN, J. 1990. “Literacy in Science: Learning to Handle Literacy as Technology.” In Liter¬

acy for a Changing World, ed. F. Christie. Hawthorn, Victoria, AU: ACER.

Rothery, J. 1992. “Assessing Children’s Writing.” In Language Assessment in Primary Class¬

rooms, ed. B. Derewianka. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

76
 5
Reading in a Second Language

Literacy in a second language develops as in the first—

globally, not linearly, and in a variety of rich contexts.
Rigg and Allen, When They Don’t All Speak English:
Integrating the ESL Student in the Regular Classroom

Contributions to Reading Theory

As suggested by the following introduction—which proved very difficult to type and

has caused my spell checker to light up the computer screen!—the approach taken in
this chapter is that effective readers do a range of things simultaneously:

Thr hs bn a It of dbat ovr th pst tn yrs abt th tchng of rding. Sme see rding as th mastry of phncs,
othrs as a procss of prdctn whrby the rder uss bckgrnd knwldge and knwledge of th lngge systm
to prdict mning.
Thees diffreing veiws haev infelunced the wya raeding has bene tuahgt. Appraochse haev
vareid betwene thoes who argeu that the taeching of phoincs is the msot imprtoant elmeent of
a raeding prorgam, and thoes who argeu fro a whoel-language appraohc in whchi childnre laern
to raed by perdicting maenngi.
But it shou_ be obvi_ to anyo_ readi_ thi_ th_ goo_ read_ use a rang_ of strateg_ to
gai_ mean_ fro_ writ_ tex_.

You were probably able to read these first three paragraphs quite easily, even
though they may have looked quite strange. Consider how you were able to do this.
What kinds of knowledge about reading did you use? First, it is obvious that a lot more
than phonics knowledge was involved. Certainly your knowledge of phonics was help¬
ful, but phonics alone would not have enabled you to interpret the texts. After all, in
the first paragraph, almost all of the vowels were omitted; in the second paragraph, all
of the letters of each word were included, but they were scrambled; and in the third
paragraph, only the beginning of each word was included. Yet none of these things pre¬
vented you from reading the texts—you were able to use other kinds of information to
read past the gaps in the phonic information. Your background knowledge of the

77
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

subject, and your knowledge of how English works, also played an important part in
enabling you to predict the words you were reading.
In his early work on reading, Goodman (1967) refers to three kinds of knowledge
on which readers draw to gain meaning from text: semantic knowledge (knowledge of
the world); syntactic knowledge (knowledge of the structure of the language; and
graphophonic knowledge (knowledge of sound-letter relationships). The next three
examples illustrate each kind of knowledge:

The sun rises in the East and sets in the_.

(Your knowledge of the world predicts that the missing word is West.)

This animal is a klinger. This is another klinger. There are two_.

(Your knowledge of how English works allows you to predict klingers, using other
plural words as an analogy. The word is a made-up one, so background knowledge
doesn’t help here!)

The flag is red, black, and y_.

(Here graphophonic knowledge is important. The letter y allows you to predict
yellow. Without this cue you would have guessed that the missing word was a color,
but not which one.)

In reality, however, readers use all three kinds of knowledge simultaneously.

Indeed, effective readers draw on different kinds of knowledge depending on what they
are reading and how much they know about the topic. For example, if the last sentence
had read, “The Aboriginal flag is red, black, and_,” most Australian readers would
have been able to predict the final word without any further cue. But readers from
other countries, who may lack this knowledge, would need more cues from the text
itself. If you reflect on your own reading, you’ll be aware that you’re able to read famil¬
iar material (e.g., an article on a topic about teaching) much faster than unfamiliar
material (e.g., an academic paper on a topic you know nothing about).
When you are unable to bring personal knowledge and understanding of a topic
to a text, you are effectively robbed of the ability to make use of a key resource for read¬
ing: what you already know. This has considerable implications for second language
learners, who may not have the same cultural or world knowledge as the writer of the
text. We will return to this later. For now, consider also the role that knowledge about
the language system plays. If you are able to read another language yourself, but are not
very fluent in the language, you will find that your reading relies much more on
graphophonic cues than does your reading in English, and so you read much more
slowly—the resources that are available to a fluent speaker of the language are not
available to you. Many ESL children are also in this position when they read in En¬
glish. Again, we will return to this point later.
Another major contribution to our knowledge of reading comes from schema the¬
ory. Originally the term was used to explain how the knowledge we have about the

78
 Reading in a Second Language

world is organized into interrelated patterns based on our previous experiences and
knowledge. For example, if you go into a restaurant, you have certain expectations
about what it will be like. Someone will bring you a menu, ask if you want a drink, and
give you a check at the end. You will have a good idea how much of a tip you are
expected to leave, and you will know how to use a credit card to pay for the meal. If
you go to McDonald s, on the other hand, you will order from the counter, pay before
you get the food, and not leave a tip. Knowing what to expect and how to behave in
these two contexts comes from your previous experiences and from being part of a par-
ticular culture and society. The amount of tip to leave, and when to tip, are examples
of this kind of cultural knowledge, which varies enormously from country to country—
as anyone familiar with both North America and Australia is aware! Schema theory,
applied to reading, proposes that effective readers likewise draw on particular kinds of
culturally acquired knowledge to guide and influence the comprehension process (see
Anderson and Pearson 1984). In one well-known study, two groups of adults, white
North Americans and Native Americans, were asked to read and recall two letters
describing a typical wedding of each group. There were clear cross-cultural differences
in the way in which the same information was interpreted and recalled by the two
groups (Steffenson, Joag-Dev, and Anderson 1979).
Wallace (1992) suggests that this schematic or in-the-head knowledge may be of
two types: knowledge of the “content” or topic, and knowledge of the kind of genre.
Think, for example, of what you are able to predict from these headings alone:

Bank Robbers Hold Hostages

Area Manager required, permanent position
The Sly Cat and the Clever Mouse

It is easy to predict that the first is a newspaper headline for a news report, the second
a job advertisement, and the third a children’s story. You will probably be able to pre¬
dict a good deal of the content too. The first is likely to include details of a bank rob¬
bery, where and when it occurred, who the hostages are and how many there are, and
so on. The job advertisement will probably include details of the position, the company
it is with, criteria for the post, salary range, a reference number, and an email or postal
address for applications. The story will probably begin with an orientation telling
where the story is set and about the relationship of the characters, and in the course
of the narrative the bad cat will end up being fooled by the intelligent mouse!
We know all this even before we begin to read. This information is in our heads,
as a result of our familiarity with reading similar genres and reading about similar top¬
ics in the past; ultimately it comes from being participants in the culture in which these
texts exist. In one sense, reading simply confirms what we know: we map our already
existing experiences onto what we read. But what happens if our previous experiences
have not provided us with this particular schematic knowledge, or ii they have pro¬
vided us with different schematic knowledge? Without the predictions you were able
to make with these three texts, imagine how much more difficult they would be to

79
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

comprehend. If you have ever read a newspaper from another English-speaking coun¬
try, you will realize how much is taken for granted: the writer expects that you will
know key people, key events, and key issues relevant to that country. Without this
assumed knowledge, many newspaper stories are not easy to make sense of. And there
will always be topics that we know little about and that are therefore very difficult to
read about.
Even though we have the relevant knowledge, we still need to be “clued in to
what we are reading, and if we miss a clue, even our existing knowledge doesn t help
us. The following text lacks a title. How much are you able to understand?

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups.
Of course, one pile may be sufficient, depending on how much you have to do. If you
have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, then that is the next step; other¬
wise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to
do too few things at once than too many. In the short run this may not seem impor¬
tant, hut complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. . . . After
the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups again.
Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they can be used once
more, and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. (Adapted from Bransford
and Johnson 1972)

Although you are able to read all the words, and at one level can “understand’'
individual sentences, you would probably find it very difficult to summarize the main
points of this text. How do you know what the main points are when you don’t have
a sense of the overall meaning? (This places you in a similar position as ESL learners
who are asked to summarize texts that contain content that is unfamiliar to them.)
However, if you are told that the passage is about doing the laundry, the meaning sud¬
denly becomes clear, and individual sentences are easily interpretable. You now have
some in-the-head knowledge onto which to map the text. Yet what has changed? Cer¬
tainly not the words on the page. What has changed is the nature of your interaction
with the text—you are now reading about things that make sense to you and that link
with your own experiences. What is clear from this example is that meaning does not
reside solely in the words and structures of the text, but is constructed in the course of
a transaction between the text and the reader.

Theories of Literacy Pedagogy

As a result of a range of views about what reading is, there are many theories of liter¬
acy pedagogy. At different times (and for reasons that are frequently political rather
than educational), approaches such as phonics, whole-word, whole language, and crit¬
ical are put forward as the method that will lead to successful literacy performance.
Alan Luke and Peter Freebody (1990) argue, however, that the issue is not to do with

80
 Reading in a Second Language

which method is the most appropriate; rather, each of these general approaches
emphasizes particular aspects of literacy. It is not that one program affords literacy and
another doesnt, hut rather that different programs emphasize different “literacies.”
Luke and Freebody suggest that there are four components of literacy success, and that
successful leaders need the resources to take on four related roles as they read: the
roles of code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst. These are briefly dis¬
cussed in the next section.

Reader as Code Breaker

As a code breaker, a reader needs to be able to engage in the “technology” of written

script that is, with the sound-symbol relationships, left-to-right directionality, and
alphabet knowledge (this is the sort of knowledge that is central to the “back to basics”
movements in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia). It is true that
alphabetic awareness is well-established as a significant factor in learning to read (see
Ehri 1990), and children’s development and ultimate success in reading may be hin¬
dered by misunderstandings or lack of knowledge about how to crack the code. A good
literacy program will not ignore these elements. But as the other three roles suggest,
code breaking, though necessary, is not sufficient for the successful reading of authen¬
tic texts in real social contexts—and the importance of knowing the code does not jus¬
tify its teaching in contexts devoid of any real meaning.

Reader as a Text Participant

As a text participant, the reader connects the text with his or her own background knowl¬
edge—including knowledge of the world, cultural knowledge, and knowledge of the
generic structure—in the sorts of ways discussed earlier in this chapter. Luke and Free¬
body cite an example of the ways in which cultural knowledge is related to reading com¬
prehension, drawing on the work of Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirey, and Anderson.
In this example, a mix of eighth-grade Afro-American and Anglo-American students
read a passage about “sounding,” a form of verbal ritual insult predominantly found
among black teenagers. While the Afro-American students correctly interpreted the text
as being about verbal play, the Anglo-American students in general interpreted it as
being about a physical fight. Despite the fact that their decoding skills were as good and
possibly better than the Afro-American students, the Anglo-American students were
unable to “read” the text in a way that matched the writer’s intentions.
It is ironic, as Luke and Freebody point out, that in many standardized reading
tests, the Afro-American students, in general, would probably have scored lower than
their middle-class Anglo-American peers. Yet in this example, which acknowledges
the role of cultural knowledge, we see that the Afro-American students in fact were
the far more effective readers. Being a text participant, then, means having the
resources to match text with appropriate content and cultural knowledge.

81
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Reader as Text User

As a text user, a reader is able to participate in the social activities in which written text
plays a major part, and to recognize what counts as successful reading in a range of
social contexts. The interactions that children have around literacy events construct
their understandings about how they are expected to read particular texts. For exam¬
ple, parents may ask particular kinds of questions as they read a book aloud with young
children; teachers may model through their talk how to approach a character study in
a piece of literature; or teachers may demonstrate through their questions what knowl¬
edge counts as being significant in an information text. For an interesting and readable
account of how different socio-cultural groups take meaning from texts in different
ways, and how they model different reader roles, see Ways with Words (Brice-Heath
1983).

Reader as Text Analyst

As text analysts, readers read a text as a crafted object, one that is written by an author
who has a particular ideology or set of assumptions. An effective reader reads critically,
recognizing in the text what is assumed, not said, implied, or unquestioned. Critical
readers recognize that all texts, however authoritative they appear, represent a partic¬
ular view of the world and that readers are positioned in a certain way when they read
it. Clear examples of this reader-positioning technique are media advertisements that
deliberately seek to manipulate the reader. Critical reading entails recognizing the
many other ways in which texts of all sorts are written out of a particular belief system
or ideology and how, though in more subtle ways than advertisements, and often less
intentionally, these texts may also be manipulative. (See, for example, Cummins and
Sayers 1995.)
Each of these roles foregrounds a particular aspect of reading. Because they are all
integral to effective reading, a well-balanced literacy program will plan to make provi¬
sion for the coherent development of each of them. But they should not be seen as rep¬
resenting a developmental “sequence,” for each role can be developed at every level of
reading. Indeed, as we have seen, there are good reasons for not simply focusing on
code breaking with early readers, and, as we’ll explore later, even very young readers
can be shown how to read text critically.

Implications for ESL Learners

Many ESL students are effective readers who enjoy reading, and many are able to read
in more than one language. As Jim Cummins (1996) has argued, being able to read in
one’s first language is one of the most important factors in learning to read in a sec¬
ond. But some children, particularly those whose first experience of learning to read is
in their second language, may need particular kinds of support in learning literacy. We
should also remember that most children’s books are written with the assumption that

82
 Reading in a Second Language

their readers will be familiar with the cultural aspects of the story and will be already
fluent in the spoken language.
The earlier discussion made it clear that the knowledge readers bring to the text
is critical in their ability to get meaning from it. Of course, once we become fluent
readers, we read to gain new information, although, as we have seen, even in this case
there must still be some match between what the reader already knows and the infor¬
mation in the text. But when children are learning to read, it is important that they
develop these new and challenging skills in the context of familiar or comprehensible
content. Most teachers would accept that a very basic principle of good teaching is to
go from what students already know to what they don’t yet know, to move from the
given (already known) to the new (what is yet to be learned), and this is very much
the case with the teaching of early reading.
However, this does not imply that teachers should avoid any books that contain
unfamiliar content or cultural aspects. On the contrary, part of learning a language
involves learning about the culture in which it is used, and if we restrict what children
read to the blandness of the basal reader, we do them a disservice by presenting a
reductionist and limiting curriculum. So, rather than avoiding books that carry any
unfamiliar cultural material (an almost impossible task anyway), the challenge for the
teacher is to build up the knowledge and understandings that are relevant to the text
the children will read, so that by the time the reader interacts with the text, the text
will not be so unfamiliar. One major implication of the earlier discussion is that what
the teacher does before a book is read is an extremely important part of the overall plan
for using it with the class. Later in this chapter we look at a range of before-reading
activities.
The earlier discussion also pointed to the role that familiarity with the language
itself has in learning to read. Being unfamiliar with the language makes it almost
impossible to predict what will come next. Here is an example of how this may affect
reading. In one classroom, a student was asked to complete this sentence: Although the
light was red, the car . . . We would expect the sentence to end something like . . . the
car continued, or . . . the car kept going. Instead, the child completed the sentence to
read the car stopped. He had not understood the word although. If he met this word in
his reading, he would equally have been unable to predict the kind of meaning that fol¬
lowed it—that is, that the car did something unexpected in that context. The cues for
predicting meaning that come from knowing the language would in this context have
been unavailable to him. So, giving children opportunity to gain some familiarity with
the language of the book before they come to read it is also important. Again, a later
part of the chapter suggests some of the ways you might do this.
Without knowledge of the topic and with limited linguistic resources, a young
reader has no choice but to rely on graphophonic knowledge. As we said earlier, being
able to use this knowledge is an important part of reading, but relying on it too heav¬
ily means that children are limited in their use of other kinds of resources and in other
reader roles they will be expected to play. Children who read slowly—painfully

83
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

sounding out each letter, focusing on word by word—are often unable to carry mean-
ing at the sentence level or across stretches of discourse, so they often lose the overall
meaning of what they are reading. Ironically, however, poor readers have often been
fed a diet of remedial phonics instruction, and while this may be appropriate for a few
children, it is likely that for many young second language learners, this is precisely the
area in which they don’t need help. (Remember too that sounds and letters are very
abstract concepts, particularly when the sounds don’t match those children are accus¬
tomed to hearing in their mother tongue.) Rather, ESL learners need access to a lin¬
guistically and culturally rich reading environment, a range of reading strategies to
bring to the process of reading, and a literacy program that aims to develop all the roles
that effective readers take on.

Planning for Reading: Activities for Before, During, and After Reading

Reading activities should fulfill two major functions.

1. They should help readers understand the particular text they are reading.
2. They should help readers develop good reading strategies for reading other
texts.

In other words, it’s important that the instructional activities you use for helping
learners comprehend a particular text also model the way effective readers read. For
example, explaining all the unknown words before children read may help learners
understand the text (or it may not if the learning load is too great), but it does not help
them know what to do the next time they come to an unknown word. On the other
hand, giving children strategies about what to do when they meet an unknown word
not only helps them in that instance, but it also makes explicit strategies that can be
transferred to other reading contexts.
A useful way to think about using a text with your class is to divide the planning
into three sections: (1) what you will do before the reading; (2) what you and the chil¬
dren will do while the reading is going on: (3) and what you will do after the book has
been read (see Wallace 1992). This overall plan is a useful framework that works
whether you intend to read the book aloud yourself or whether you are planning for
children to read by themselves or in small groups. The activities that follow are exam¬
ples of what you might choose to do at each of these times. (You should select from
these what is most useful and relevant for your students.)
To begin, try to predict what will be unfamiliar content or language for your stu¬
dents. Look for aspects of everyday life that may not be familiar to recently arrived
children. Christmas, a visit to the beach, a visit to the zoo, a barbecue or picnic, an
overnight stay with friends, birthday parties, school graduation, camps and excursions,
surfing, watching a football match or baseball game, going to a disco, keeping pets, and
many other aspects of life reflected in children’s books are not taken for granted by all
cultural groups. And there are considerable differences between families within any

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particular ethnic or cultural grpup, too. (Not all of these things will be part of your
everyday life either, since they contain North American, British, and Australian exam-
pies!) Also note aspects of the language that may cause difficulty for students. These
may include unfamiliarity with the genre; unknown connectives and conjunctions; use
of pronouns, auxiliary verbs, or tenses; long sentences; or unfamiliar vocabulary,
phrases, and idioms.

Before-Reading Activities

The purpose of these activities is to prepare for linguistic, cultural, and conceptual diT
ficulties and to activate prior knowledge. They should aim to develop knowledge in
relation to the overall meaning of the text, not to deal with every potential difficulty. As
schema theory suggests, if students come to the text with a sense of what they will be
reading about, reading becomes a much easier task because they have more resources
to draw on. The reader will be less dependent on the words on the page and will be able
to minimize the disadvantage of having less than native-speaker proficiency in the
language.
There is another advantage of well-designed before-reading activities. Because
learners will have some sense of overall meaning, they are likely to be able to compre¬
hend more linguistically challenging language than they might otherwise be able to
comprehend. It has been found, for example, that ESL children who heard a story ini¬
tially in their mother tongue better understood unfamiliar language structures of the
story when it was later read in English. The text can therefore also serve the purpose
of extending learners’ linguistic abilities by providing models of new language.
Here are some examples of before-reading activities. They all provide a context
in which the teacher can guide learners into understanding the major concepts and
ideas in the text. In discussion, try to use any particular vocabulary and language pat¬
terns that occur in the text; you can do this informally simply by using them as you
interact with children.

Predicting from Words

Put a word or phrase from the text on the board and ask children to say what they
think it will be about, or what words they associate with the topic. Develop a seman¬
tic web based on the children’s suggestions. Add a few words yourself that you know
occur in the text, and discuss the meaning.

Predicting from Title or First Sentence

Write up the title of the book, or the first sentence of the text, and get children to pre¬
dict what kind of text it is (e.g., a narrative or an information text) and what the text
will be about. You might wish to guide the class in a way that will best help them deal
with the major concepts or events in the text to be read.

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Predicting from a Key Illustration

Photocopy a key illustration from the book and give children time in pairs or groups to
say what they think the topic is about, or what the story will be. For example, based on
a text about earthquakes the class would later be reading, one teacher gave the class a
picture of the devastation after an earthquake and asked them to guess what had hap¬
pened. She then introduced some new vocabulary that would occur in the text: tremor,
Richter Scale, shocks, aftershocks. Almost all children were quickly able to relate these
to the words they knew in their first language.

Sequencing Illustrations

Give groups of children a set of pictures relating to the story, and ask the students to
put them into a possible sequence.

Reader Questions

Give children the title of the book or a key illustration and encourage them to pose
questions they would like answered. The children using the earthquake text wrote
questions such as When did it happen1 Where did it occur? How many people were killed?
How big was it1 The teacher posted these questions on the wall, and the children
looked for answers as they read the text later. (Here is another context for students to
ask questions to which they want to find answers, as well as to practice question
forms.)

Storytelling

If you are using a narrative, tell the story simply, before reading it, using the illustra¬
tions from the book or doing simple line drawings of your own on the board as you are
narrating it.

Storytelling in the Mother Tongue

Tell the story in the children’s first language (or invite a parent or other caregiver to
do so) before reading it in English. If you have children who speak only English in the
class, the experience will be valuable for them too. It will demonstrate your respect and
acceptance of other languages, position the second language learners in the class as
proficient language users, and show children that all languages are a means of
communication.

Sharing Existing Knowledge

For an information text, use an information grid such as that described in Chapter 4,
and ask children to fill in what they already know about the topic. This is best done in
groups.

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The more time you spend on these kinds of activities, the easier the reading will
he, and the more likely it will be that students read for meaning. Don’t be tempted to
reduce before-reading work to the explanation of a few key words! Of course, if the
text you are using is part of a larger unit of work, much of this knowledge building will
already be occurring in an ongoing way. One of the great advantages of an integrated
approach is that reading occurs in a context where students are already developing an
overall schema for the topic. And comprehension is much more likely to be improved
when vocabulary and language are associated with broad concepts and recur in an
ongoing context, than when instruction is in terms of single words or language items
(see Carrell 1988).

During-Reading Activities

The purpose of these activities is to model good reading strategies. Good readers are
actively involved in the text; they constantly interrogate and interact with it, and they
predict what is coming. This is largely an unconscious process for fluent readers. The
aim of during-reading activities is to make explicit some of these unconscious processes
and to demonstrate the interactive nature of reading.
Once students have some idea of the genre and content of what they will be read¬
ing, it is time for the reading itself. Depending on the age and reading levels of the stu¬
dents, the first three activities described next are recommended as regular activities to
use.

Modelled Reading

It’s useful to read the text aloud to the class the first time as a reading model for the
students, using appropriate pausing and expression. Try to bring the text to life—
students need to see that print has meaning and is not simply a functionally empty
exercise. With lower-level learners, remember that the more times something is read
or heard, the more comprehension there will be. So don’t read a text just once. A
favorite book used in shared book time can be read again and again. As you read,
encourage the children to see if their predictions were correct, but make clear that it
doesn’t matter if they weren’t—often our predictions about things are wrong.

Skimming and Scanning the Text

These are important reading strategies with which students need to become familiar.
When readers skim a text, they read it quickly to get an idea of the general content.
When they scan they also read fast, but the purpose is to look out for particular infor¬
mation. Searching down a telephone list, a train timetable, or a TV guide with the aim
of finding a particular item are everyday examples of this. Some learners may have been
trained to read in only one way—focusing on each word and every detail on the first
reading. These students in particular will need practice in learning to skim and scan. It s

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important that you also make explicit the contexts in which we skim and scan, anc
point out that we read in different ways depending on our purposes for reading.
When students are going to read the text alone, and particularly if you haven t first
read it aloud yourself, ask them first to skim it quickly. Explain that the purpose of this
is to get a general idea of what it’s about and a sense of the main ideas. Students can
also scan the text to check any predictions they made. Again, it doesn’t matter if these
predictions were wrong; the actual process of having made predictions will encourage
them to read the text more interactively. When students go into a text with a mis¬
conception, they are more likely to take note of the information presented there,
because information that runs counter to one’s expectations is usually more memo¬
rable than information that simply confirms what one already thinks. While the stu¬
dents are skimming the text on this first reading, they can also see if they can find the
answers to any questions they asked.

Rereading for Detail

Let the students read the text again, more carefully this time. The purpose of this is to
make sure they have understood the information. Get them to underline or make a
note of words or phrases they don’t understand. They can discuss these in pairs.
Remind them of strategies they can use to work out the meaning of unknown words,
and point out that three things can help us: (1) the language that surrounds the word
in the text; (2) our knowledge of the topic; and (3) what we know about similar words.
Also remind them that knowing the exact meaning of every word is not essential every
time we read, unless it prevents us from gaining the information we need.
Encourage students to use the following strategies when they are faced with an
unknown word or phrase:

• Read to the end of the sentence to see if this helps in understanding the word.
• Look at the text that comes before and after the word; the word may be easier
to understand later, with other clues to meaning.
• Use pictures to help guess the meaning.
• Think about the function of the word: is it a noun, verb, adjective?
• Look for the same word somewhere else; its meaning might be clearer there.
• Look for familiar word parts, such as prefixes and suffixes.
• Use a bilingual or English-English dictionary. Note that students should turn to
a dictionary as a last resort and use it in combination with the other strategies.
While dictionaries are a useful resource and students should be encouraged to
use them when necessary, relying too heavily on a dictionary slows up reading
and works against the development of the strategies listed above. It should also
be remembered that definitions often don’t adequately explain a meaning in the
particular context in which it is being used, and that students may often select
a wrong or inappropriate meaning.

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You can place a similar sort of list on a wall. Remind students about these strate-
gies whenever they read a new text. After they have finished reading, encourage dis¬
cussion about how they dealt with the unknown words they came across.

Shared Book

With young learners, shared book (sometimes called shared reading) can be a highly
effective early reading activity. It involves using a Big Book in a group or whole-class
activity. Shared book models how an experienced reader reads and how reading
involves getting meaning from print. This understanding is particularly important
when students are at an early stage of reading development.
For shared book, introduce the book through a range of before-reading activities,
and then read it aloud several times, encouraging children to join in as they remember
or recognize words or phrases. In later readings, using a pointer to point to words as
you read helps children link the sounds of words with their shape on the page, and
demonstrates left-to-right directionality and word spacing.

Word Masking

Once a Big Book has been read several times, mask some of the words with small
pieces of paper. Ask children to predict what the word is. Allow time to discuss alter¬
native choices. For example, if the word is replied and someone guesses said, respond
positively to this and use it as a basis for discussion. Among the words you mask,
include not only “content” words, but also “functional” words, such as pronouns and
conjunctions. As we mentioned earlier, these functional or grammatical words are
important in enabling readers to use syntactic cues.
In later rereadings you can use this activity to develop vocabulary knowledge by
focusing on alternatives for some of the words. Ask questions like What’s another word
we could use here! What other words instead of said could the writer use1 This is a good
way to develop vocabulary knowledge in context, and to build up word lists that can
be displayed for children to use as a resource for their own writing.

Pause and Predict

As you are reading, stop at significant points and ask questions like What do you think
is going to happen! What’s she going to do! If you were (character’s name), what would you
do! The goal here is to engage learners in the process of meaning making, not to have
them verbalize the “right” answers.

Shadow Reading

Record yourself reading the text, and use this recording with small groups of children
or individuals, who should listen and follow the text from their own copy. Sometimes
ask children to read aloud along with the tape. While reading aloud is not the same as

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“reading,” shadowing is nevertheless a valuable activity because it demonstrates how

meaning is made through text, and how intonation, stress, and the patterns of spoken
language are related to the words on the page.

Summarizing the Text

If students are unable to summarize what they have read, chances are strong that they
have not understood the text fully, and that they are still unfamiliar with the content.
(Remember how hard it was to summarize the “laundry text” when you didn t know
what it was about.) Note that it isn’t necessarily appropriate to summarize all kinds of
texts. However, if this is something you want to focus on, here are some ways to help
students practice summarizing skills.

• Get students to write a summary. Limit the maximum number of sentences or

words they can use, pointing out that this means they must focus only on the
most important points.
• Ask students to suggest a title for each paragraph.
• Either alone or with teacher support, have students write two or three sen¬
tences under each paragraph title and use these to write a short summary of the
whole passage.
• If you are using a narrative, get students to retell it in shorter and shorter ways
until it is as short as possible. Write this up on the board and then discuss with
students the kind of information that is now missing.
• Have students explain the key points to someone else in less than one minute.
• Get groups of students to decide on one sentence from the text that best sums
it up or is most central to the story. There will probably be some disagreement
about this, but the discussion should help students sort out key points and help
you see how they are interpreting the text.

Jigsaw Reading

You need three or four different readings around the same topic. If you have varying
reading levels in the class, include a simpler reading and a more challenging reading.
Place students in expert/home grouping. Each group first becomes an “expert” in one
of the readings and then shares the information in a mixed group. This kind of activ¬
ity gives reading a real purpose, since the aim is to share what one has read with oth¬
ers. It is also a useful way of having readers at different levels work collaboratively
(even the poorer readers will be able to contribute in the group since their reading will
have information that other members in the group don’t have). Finally, it provides an
authentic context for developing summarizing skills, since each group of experts must
decide on the key points they are later going to share with others. Depending on the
level of the students, it may be useful to focus on note-making skills here, or to pro¬
vide an information grid to guide students in locating key information.

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Reading Aloud

Listening to an experienced reader helps learners recognize that good readers make
meaning, and it plays an important role in the development of reading competence.
While this is especially important for young learners, the value of reading aloud should
not be neglected with older learners. Serializing a longer book presents many opportu¬
nities for predicting what will happen. Or you may choose to simply whet children’s
appetites by reading only part of a book and leaving it for them to finish. It is also
important to read nonfiction texts with students. This will help them get used to the
more complex language patterns of transactional prose, and to familiarize them with
different kinds of texts.

After-Reading Activities

These activities are based on the assumption that students are already familiar with the
text, and no longer have basic comprehension difficulties in reading it. The activities
use the text as a springboard, and may fulfill any of these three major purposes:

1. To use the now-familiar text as a basis for specific language study, such as to
focus on a particular item of grammar, idiom, or phonic knowledge that occurs
in the text.
2. To allow students an opportunity to respond creatively to what they have read,
such as through art or drama activities.
3. To focus students more deeply on the information in the text, such as by using
information transfer activities that represent the information in a different form
(e.g., a time line or a diagram).

Well-designed after-reading activities usually require students to keep returning to the

text and rereading it to check on specific information or language use.

Story Innovation

Story innovation can be a teacher-led or small-group activity. Using the original story
as a basis, key words are changed to make a new story, while retaining the underlying
structure. For example, students could change the characters in the folktale The Ele¬
phant and the Mouse to a whale and a little fish. While the central meaning of the tale
should remain the same (the weak helps the strong and they become friends), key
words and events are changed to fit in with the new characters. As the changes are
made, the story is written up on a large sheet of paper.

Innovating on the Ending

Write a new ending to a story, in groups or as a whole class.

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Cartoon Strip

In groups, or individually, students turn the story into a cartoon strip, using the words
of the dialogue in the original to write in the “speech bubbles.”

Readers’ Theatre

In its simplest form, you provide a group of children with copies of the story. Each
chooses the dialogue of one of the characters to read, while other children share the
narration. This can be practiced until it is word perfect and then performed to the class.
Readers’ Theatre is a much better context for children reading aloud than the tradi¬
tional “reading around the class,” since it allows them a chance to practice the reading
(which is what adults would do if they knew they were going to read in front of others),
and it provides a meaningful purpose for the reading.
Depending on their reading and language levels, some children can write scripts
based on the story. Puppets can also be used in Readers’ Theatre.

Wanted Posters

Ask students to design a wanted poster for a character in a story, incorporating as

much of the information in the text as possible (who they are, their description, what
events are associated with them, and so on).

Story Map

A story map is a visual representation of the main features of a story. It can be drawn
after a story is read, or it can involve an ongoing process of adding details as the story
is progressing.

Time Lines

Texts that incorporate the passage of time lend themselves to a time line. These
include narratives and some information texts (e.g., those that relate to events in his¬
tory, or to the description of life cycles or processes). Children can also illustrate key
events on the time line.

Hot Seat

This activity is based on a narrative text. Children are seated in a circle, with one chair
being designated the hot seat.” The student in the hot seat represents a character
from a book that has been shared by the class. Other students ask him or her questions
to find out more about the character’s life. Questions might include the following:
Where do you live’ Can you tell us about some of your friends’ What do you most enjoy
doing? How did you feel when . . . ’ What do you think of (another character in the book) ?
Children take turns being in the hot seat. While they are free—and should be

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encouraged to invent information, they mustn’t say anything that is inconsistent

with the story or with what has been learned from the other hot-seaters.
After a while, play around with the time frame of the story by moving into the past
or the future. Get children to stand and slowly walk counterclockwise in a circle, and
as they are walking tell them they are time travelers going backward in time. Give the
children a specific point in time, such as “Now it’s seventy years ago and the old
woman in the story is just a little girl.” Continue the hot seat activity as before, con-
structing an earlier life for one of the characters. Later, children can move clockwise
around the circle, forward in time, until young characters in the story are now old peo¬
ple, or perhaps they are now dead and are being remembered by others.
In this way the original story takes on a further life, and children will have a wealth
of ideas for their own story writing. Rereading the original story, now that so much is
“known’ about the entire lives of some of the characters, also becomes a very thought-
provoking and enriching reading experience.

Freeze Frames

Freeze frames are a kind of drama activity that show a series of tableaux representing
key stages in a story. Each tableau is a “still,” with the students taking the role of spe¬
cific characters. Simple props can be used. The audience members close their eyes
while the group prepares the first tableau, and at a signal from the group, they open
their eyes and look at it for about ten seconds. Then they close their eyes again while
the group prepares the second tableau, and so on until the story is told. The audience
thus views the actions as a series of frozen frames. Groups will need some time to pre¬
pare this. They first need to decide on what the key stages are (see the previous chap¬
ter for the overall structure of a narrative), then decide how they will represent them,
and finally practice moving from one to the other as quickly as possible (otherwise the
audience will not keep their eyes closed!). Since freeze frames do not require students
to say anything at the presentation stage, even newly arrived children will be able to
participate fully in the freeze frame. At the same time, the preparation of the frames
requires students to discuss important elements of the story and make decisions about
how to portray the characters and events.

Cloze

Traditional cloze exercises, the device of deleting words from a text, can be based on
the text that has been read. When you make the deletions, you should keep at least
the first and last sentences intact so that students have a context in which to read the
text. Encourage students first to read the cloze straight through before they attempt to
fill in the gaps. To provide extra support for lower-level readers, you can give students
a list of the words that have been left out.
Originally, cloze exercises were aimed at testing rather than teaching. However, in
more recent years, their potential for developing learners’ reading strategies has been

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recognized. A well-constructed cloze can give you information about what kinds of
strategies children are using to predict meaning, and it can help children think about
their own reading strategies. Traditional cloze involves deleting every fifth, sixth, or
seventh word, and it encourages readers to reference backward and forward in the text
to work out what the missing words are likely to be. It therefore mirrors the kind of
reading strategies used by proficient readers. However, cloze exercises can also be used
more selectively, with only certain kinds of words deleted. For example, you can choose
to delete key content vocabulary that is integral to the topic, or grammatical items
such as adjectives, connectives, pronouns, past tenses, and so forth. Cloze exercises are
often more successful when students work in pairs, since there will be discussion about
why certain choices are made. The aim is not simply for children to get the “right”
answer but to become aware of what they do when they read.
After finishing a cloze, always allow time for discussion. Children should be able
to justify the words they have chosen and explain to others their rationale for their
choice. To make this discussion easier for the class, put the cloze on an overhead so
that it is easier to talk about the possible and most appropriate choices with the class.
(Remember that while there is often a range of possible and appropriate words to fill
“content” gaps, there is a much smaller range of options for grammatical items.)

T Monster Cloze

This consists of only a title and gaps. It can be based on the text the students have
read, or on a summary of it. Write the title of the passage on the board in full. The pas-
sage itself, however, consists of only the gaps! Students guess the missing words (in any
order), and the teacher writes in any correct words in the appropriate gap. After the
sentences are partially completed, students should be able to predict more and more
of the words of the passage by using their knowledge of the topic and of the language.

T Vanishing Cloze

This is a further variation on cloze. Select a short excerpt from the text the students
have read (three or four sentences only, or a shorter section for beginners) or a sum¬
mary of it. Write the excerpt on the board, and ask students to read it aloud together.
Erase one word from anywhere in the text. Students read it again, putting back the
missing word. Erase another word and repeat the process. Continue until all the words
are removed, so that students are now “reading” from memory. It’s important that after
each word is removed, students repeat the reading; this requires them to replace more
and more words each time. These repeated readings are especially helpful if the text
contains a tricky grammatical structure or subject-specific vocabulary that the stu¬
dents are currently learning, since it provides a context for repetition that is both fun
and challenging.

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Text Reconstruction

Cut an excerpt from the text into paragraphs or sentences. Students must put the sen¬
tences or paragraphs in the right order and explain why they have chosen that order.
This is a good context for focusing on text cohesion and drawing attention to refer¬
ence words and conjunctions.

Consonant Groups

Children sort a number of small objects (e.g., a pencil, pen, paper, box, ball, lid, leaf)
or pictures of objects into groups, depending on their initial sound. You can use this
either as a general reading activity, or you could base the words on those in the text
the children have just read. For young children, you could make up class collections of
pictures that are kept in boxes labeled with their initial letter. Encourage children to
bring pictures from magazines to add to the collection. These “consonant boxes” can
also be used for sorting activities.

Phonic Families

Use a familiar Big Book and the masking technique to focus on how particular sounds
are represented by particular letters or clusters of letters (e.g., the sound /ai/ as repre¬
sented by igh). Begin to build up lists of words that contain the same sound and are
spelled the same way.

Jumbled Sentences

For beginner readers, take a sentence from the text and write it on a strip of cardboard.
Cut up the sentence into words. Children must reconstruct the sentence by putting
the words into the right order. For very early readers, make this a simpler task by pro¬
viding the model sentence on a separate strip. Children then place the cut-up words
on top of the matching words on the sentence strip.

Picture and Sentence Matching

Take about six illustrations with matching sentences from the book. Cut them up into
separate pictures and sentences. Children match the pictures with the appropriate
sentences.

True/False Questions

Children decide on whether a number of statements about the text are true or false. Make
sure that these involve inferential as well as literal comprehension. Literal statements can
be checked directly against the information in the text, whereas the truth of inferential
statements needs to be inferred from the text. Here are examples of both types.

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Sentence in the text: The earthquake struck at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Literal statement: The earthquake struck at three o clock. TRUE OR FALSE?
Inferential statement: The earthquake struck during the daytime. TRUE OR FALSE.

In general, inferential statements (and questions) give you a better idea of how much
readers have understood, since literal questions can often be answered correctly with-
out comprehension of meaning (for an example of this, see Gibbons 1993, 70).

Questioning the Text

As we discussed earlier, being able to read critically is an important part of being truly
literate. To alert children to the hidden messages of text, and the underlying assump¬
tions about reality made by the writer, teachers need to ask different kinds of questions
and use different kinds of activities from those normally associated with text compre¬
hension. Here are some examples.

• Focus on the pictures and on what the characters are doing. For a book where
family life is depicted, you might ask things like What is the mother doing? What
is the father doing? Do all mothers and fathers do these things? What other things do
mothers and fathers do? Seek to show children that books do not necessarily
depict the “whole truth,” and that other kinds of reality and role options also
exist. Try to be inclusive of all children’s experiences.
• Discuss with children what the characters are like. Ask: What words are used to
describe the characters? When the characters are mentioned in the text, what words
can you find in the text that tell you about them? This will focus children’s atten¬
tion on what the characters are doing, and how they are described. It will also
require them to go back to the text to reread parts of it with a more critical per¬
spective.
• Make lists with the children of words or ideas that are associated with key peo¬
ple in the text. This is an interesting activity to use with information texts, too.
In one classroom, the children were comparing how a particular sports writer
wrote about top male and female athletes, and what kinds of information and
descriptive words were included (or omitted). They found that considerably
more was written about the physical appearance of the women, including words
relating to their attractiveness, than was written about the men. It was also
noted that some were mothers! Conversely, much more relevant information
(about their athletic prowess and previous career) was included for the men,
hut much less space was devoted to information about their family life. Yet until
the children set out to look tor these associations, or collocations, and list the
kinds of information the text included, they had not noticed these differences.
When helping children develop critical perspectives on what they read,
remember that it is also important to look at what is not said.

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Have children rewrite a folktale, changing the key physical or personality char¬
acteristics of the characters.
• Talk with the children about stereotyping. In one classroom, the children were
reading a story set in Fiji, which contained very stereotypical views of life on a
tropical island. As one of the children in the class had recently arrived from Fiji,
the teacher assigned him the role of informant, whom other children could
question about everyday life in Fiji. Later, having decided that the book did not
represent the Fiji they had learned about from their classmate, a group rewrote
the hook. They had learned a useful lesson: what you read is not necessarily
“true.”

A word of warning when you are helping children read critically. Taking a critical per¬
spective may lead into discussions that are highly connected to children’s lives. Be pre¬
pared for this, and treat the personal stories that may result with empathy and
sensitivity. Avoid forcing children to contribute to any discussion they are not com¬
fortable with; however, in an open and nonthreatening environment, we should try not
to shy away from the issues that the books themselves present. And equally important,
children should not be left feeling helpless or positioned as “victims.” Positive strate¬
gies and ways of action should result from critical discussions, such as the rewriting of
the book about Fiji. Other actions might include making new and more inclusive illus¬
trations for a text, or a class letter to a newspaper editor.

Choosing Books: A Reason for Turning the Page

There is considerable evidence to suggest that, while overall language development

supports reading, so too does reading support language development (Wallace 1988,
1992). Language is learned through reading; it is not simply a prerequisite for it. Given
appropriate texts, learners develop their language skills in the course of reading itself,
perhaps because the patterns of language are “open to notice” in written language in
a way that they are not in spoken language. So the more fluently and widely that ESL
students read, the more exposure to the second language they will gain.
Research also suggests that second language learners are able to determine the
meanings of quite large numbers of unfamiliar English structures if they are presented
in the context of meaningful sentences (see, for example, Elley 1984; Wallace 1988).
This implies that particular language structures don’t have to be in the active reper¬
toire of learners (i.e., able to he used) to be understood in reading. As long as learners
have a sense of the overall meaning of what they read, wide reading is an effective way
of learning new language items, not simply of reinforcing or practicing old ones.
One clear implication of this view of the role of reading in language development
is that the hooks that children read must provide a rich linguistic environment. In the
past, many books used in school were written simply to “teach reading.” Here is an
example of the kind of language common to such books:

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Page 1 See John. See Susan.

Page 2 See John and Susan run.
Page 3 Here is Rex.
Page 4 Here is the ball. See Rex run.
Page 5 Run Rex run. Run Susan run! Run John run.

It is true that a few children appear to gain some satisfaction from being able to decode
such books, but we should ask ourselves what they are learning about reading if this
represents their major reading diet, and whether this route to reading is the most pro¬
ductive for second language learners.
First, books like this are in some ways much more difficult to read than a complete
story, especially for young readers, because it is almost impossible to predict what will
come next. Thus learners are forced into total reliance on phonics. Because they are
led to concentrate on the visual and phonic characteristics of words, they are led away
from an understanding of text as coherent language. Of course, the major rationale for
the choice of words in this instance is not to present authentic language, but to pres¬
ent a particular sound or word as frequently as possible. But as Wallace (1988) com¬
ments, “Books that set out to teach reading are frequently not so much books as strings
of sentences that do not connect to build up any kind of text with a beginning, a mid¬
dle and an end” (150). The pages quoted here can in fact be read backwards, putting
the last sentence first, without any loss or much change of meaning! Learners are thus
encouraged to think that reading is a random activity that can apparently start or stop
at any point in the text, and that we read words or sentences but not continuous text.
Such books also seem to assume, quite wrongly, that short words are “easier” to read.
Yet we have all had experience of very young children recognizing salient words in
their environment, such as the McDonald’s sign or their own name. And we have also
probably had children who can happily read words like dinosaur or Pokemon hut balk at
words like was, ball, or toy in basal readers.
Texts like the one shown here are also func¬
tionally empty; there is little meaning to be had and
no access to the rich models of language that are so
important for ESL children. And finally, as many
children, their teachers, and their families know,
books like this are mind-numbingly boring.
We don’t, of course, want learners to leam lessons
like this. Rather, as Wallace (1988) succinctly puts it,
“We want to give learner-readers a reason for turning
the page” (151). Good readers read for pleasure, to
extend their worldview, to read more about what
interests them, or to find out things they want or need
to know about. And these are the sorts of purposes for Books like this are
reading we want children to have. As I argued earlier, mindo'iumbingly boring

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 Reading in a Second Language

children should not be restricted to the familiar, the known, and the “easy,” and fed a
watered-down version of written language. Rather, as the activities in this chapter aim to
do, the challenge for teachers is to find ways of giving learners access to well-written chil¬
drens literature and relevant information texts.
There are many criteria for choosing books, and it is beyond the scope of this
chapter to discuss these in detail. But for beginning readers who are learning to read
in their second language, books that have the following characteristics will be sup¬
portive of early reading.

• Repetitive language that becomes familiar to children so that they can begin to
join in (e.g., Run, run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread
man).
• A repetitive event that builds up into a cumulative story (e.g., First the farmer, then
his wife, then the child, then the dog, then the cat, then the mouse ... all tried to pull up
the giant turnip). Many stories include a repetitive structure of this sort, which
decreases the comprehension load on ESL children. Once they understand the
event, they are able to transfer their understanding to each repetition.
• Universal themes (e.g., good triumphs over evil), universal motifs (e.g., three
sons or daughters, the two eldest of whom are bad, the youngest of whom is
good), and the teaching of moral behavior (e.g., kindness gets rewarded).
• Illustrations that clearly represent the meanings in the text and that can be
used as cues to meaning.
• Clear print and well-laid-out pages that are not too “busy.”
• Good, authentic models of language that doesn’t sound contrived.
• Content and language that, while it might not be immediately accessible, can
be “bridged” for ESL readers.
• Content and language that can be used to extend children’s knowledge about
reading and about the world.
• Content that is of interest and that will be enjoyable to read.

As this list suggests, probably one of the best ways to introduce reading to ESL
children is by using fairytales. These seem to incorporate some kind of “universal
schema” that children from all cultures are able to relate to. Because of their univer¬
sality in terms of overall themes and motifs, they are likely to make sense to children
in ways that other texts may not, and even where specific characters and settings in
the stories are different, many cultures share basic stories in common.
For older learners who are reading longer factual texts, the following is also
important:

• Clear overall text organization. The better organized a text is, the easier it is to
understand, and the more the reader is able to engage in higher-level processes
such as summarizing and inferring.

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

• Clear signaling devices. The structure and content of a well-organized text is

highlighted by such devices as titles, headings, clear topic sentences, and text
cohesion.
• Appropriate conceptual density. New concepts should be spaced, and contain
sufficient elaboration to make them understandable.
• Good instructional devices, such as a logically organized table of contents, glos¬
sary, index, graphic overviews, diagrams, and summaries.

In addition, the choice of books to use with your students will be affected by a
number of other factors, such as their age, interests, and overall reading abilities. It will
also be affected by your purpose in using the book. Will the hook be used as instruc¬
tional material aimed to extend a student’s reading skills, and thus be a little ahead of
the student’s independent reading ability? Or is the book intended as part of a wide
reading program, and thus something that children should be able to read fairly inde¬
pendently? In terms of the overall reading program, do children have access to a range
of books, and a range of genre types? As this chapter has suggested, how comprehen¬
sible a book is will also be determined by the kinds of activities you use and the kinds
of interactions the children will be engaged in around the text. However, whatever the
books you choose, seek to ensure that they will give children “a reason for turning the
page.”

In Summary

In this chapter we have seen how unfamiliarity with aspects of a text (the knowledge
it assumes, the genre, or the language itself) may cause difficulties for second language
readers. While in some cases this may lead you to decide not to use a book, it may be
more important for learning if, instead, you find ways to build bridges into the text,
through the kinds of activities you choose to do before, during, and after reading. In
this way, ESL learners can gain access to a wider range of books and richer reading
experiences. We have also discussed the inadequacies of approaches that see basic
decoding skills as reading, and we have looked at how readers must learn to take on a
number of “reader roles.” These roles can be developed simultaneously as children
progress in their reading. Finally, we have looked at the importance of choosing hooks
that encourage children to read—and to want to go on reading.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Carrell, E 1988. “Interactive Text Processing: Implications for ESL/Second Language Read-
ing Classrooms. In Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading, ed. E Carrell, J.
Devine, and D. Eskey. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University7 Press.

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 Reading in a Second Language

GARIBALDI Allen, V. 1994- “Selecting Materials for the Reading Instruction of ESL Children.”
In Kids Come in All Languages: Reading Instruction for ESL Students, ed. K. Spangenberg-
Urbschat and R. Pritchard. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Wallace, C. 1992. “Reading and Social Meaning.” Chapter 5 in Reading, ed. C. Wallace.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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 6
Listening
An Active and Thinking Process

Listening is primarily a thinking process—thinking

about meaning. Michael Rost, Listening in Action

Making Sense of What We Hear

The teaching of listening is often assumed to “happen” in the process of the teaching
of speaking; indeed many teaching programs and syllabuses refer to “listening and
speaking” as a single unit, and so the specific teaching of listening is often overlooked.
Yet in terms of learning, and second language learning in particular, listening is a key
to language development: understanding what is said in a particular situation helps to
provide important models for language use. While most elementary classrooms are
busy and exciting places for children, they are also frequently quite noisy. And even if
this noise is kept to a minimum, there is usually a level of background buzz that may
make it very difficult for children to comprehend what is said given that it is in a sec¬
ond language. (As you might have experienced yourself, background noise tends to
interfere with comprehension far more if you are listening to a less familiar language.)
The process of listening is in many ways similar to the process of reading. Both
involve comprehension rather than production, and both involve the active construc¬
tion of meaning. To begin, try this listening test with a colleague.
One of you should read aloud one short paragraph from a book. The other should
try to “shadow” the reader only by listening (not reading) and repeating as closely as pos¬
sible the words as they are being read. You will probably find that the person who is “shad¬
owing” will be only a syllable or so behind the reader. Now do the same thing again—but
this time the reader should read the passage backwards. How easy is it now to “shadow”?
If you are the person shadowing, you will probably have found it a much more difficult
task, and you will probably find you are much further behind the reader. Why should this
be, given that the individual words and the sounds are exactly the same?
The answer, of course, is that the second reading doesn’t make sense: there is no
meaning for the listener. What the listener is hearing in the second reading is simply a
string of unconnected words. But to listen effectively we need to do more than simply

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 Listening

recognize sounds and words. We need more than the acoustic information to gain mean-
just as in reading we need more than phonic information. Like reading, effective lis-
tening depends on the expectations and predictions about content, language, and genre
that the listener brings to the text. And so, just like reading, listening is an active process
that depends not only on decoding the acoustic information—the sounds—but also on
the listener s in-the-head knowledge about the world and about the structure of the lan¬
guage. That is why shadowing the first reading was much easier than shadowing the sec¬
ond reading: you were able to draw on more sources of information.
To make the same point in another way, here is another listening activity. Imagine
this time that you are listening to the story below. (Ideally, get someone to read it
aloud.) At certain points you are asked to predict what happens next.

Once upon a time there was a very rich farmer who spent many evenings
counting his gold. He thought of nothing else except his gold. He loved no
one in the world and no one ever visited him. But one dark, cold and snowy
night . . .
WHAT DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN?

. .. there was a knock on the door. The rich farmer opened the door, and there
stood a poor, old, thin man.
WHAT DID THE OLD MAN SAY?

“Kind farmer,” said the old man, “please give me shelter and a piece of bread.”
WHAT DID THE FARMER SAY?

“Get away from my door,” the farmer said angrily. “I have nothing to give you.”

You were probably able to predict the answers to the questions easily—not the exact
wording, but certainly the overall meaning. You can probably predict the overall story
line as well. Yet you did not get all this information from what you heard alone.
In the last chapter, we noted how earlier models of reading saw it as being no more
than decoding phonics. Earlier models of listening paralleled this. The process of lis¬
tening was seen as one where the listener segmented a stream of speech into its con¬
stituent sounds, linked these to form words and then chained these words into clauses,
sentences, and finally whole text. Nunan (1990) refers to this model of listening as
“the listener as tape recorder,” implying that the learner is a passive receiver of spoken
language who takes no active part in making meaning. By contrast, more recent mod¬
els of listening see the listener as what Nunan refers to as a “meaning builder.” As in
the process of reading, the listener is seen as taking an active role: listeners construct
an interpretation of what they hear using not only the sounds of the language, but also,
just as in reading, their available schema and knowledge of the language system.

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

When we think about the listening process, the notion of a “script” is useful. Just
as in a play script, when the lines the actors speak are prewritten, in listening we draw
on those “scripts” that are familiar to us through our previous experiences. Imagine,
for example, that you meet a friend who has just returned from am overseas trip. When
you ask her how the journey was, she comments:

It was good except for where I was sitting on the plane. They wouldn t let me move. The
seat was. . .
What sorts of things do you think your friend is going to talk about?
Who are the “actors” in this script?
What are the sources of the knowledge you need in order to interpret this, in order
to predict what your friend is likely to say?

Anyone familiar with plane travel will have a good idea what is likely to be said.
Perhaps the seat was too cramped, or perhaps she had requested an aisle or window
seat hut didn’t get it. Maybe she was sitting next to someone unpleasant, or she was
near a crying baby. They refers to the air stewards, or possibly the ground staff at check¬
in. The actors in this script are your friend and the steward (and possibly the ground
staff) with whom she spoke about the problem, and possibly other passengers. The
sources of knowledge that you used to interpret this snippet of conversation are your
own experiences of air travel, or what you have learned from others’ experiences.
On the other hand, it you had never experienced air travel, or heard about it from
others, none of this interpretation and prediction would be possible. Again, note the
similarity to the process of reading and the importance of background knowledge of
the topic in understanding what we hear. Once more, it is clear that understanding
what is said is not simply dependent on the sounds we hear.
Consequently, listening tasks in the classroom, just like reading tasks, are far more
demanding if children have no previous knowledge on which to draw. Lack of com¬
prehension is likely to be due to this, just as much as to the fact that learners may find
certain sounds difficult to discriminate. Practice in sound discrimination in a listening
program, just like the teaching of phonics in the reading program, is necessary but not
sufficient to ensure comprehension. And for most children, difficulty in discrimination
between particular pairs of sounds and their pronunciation does not remain a problem
for long. Before considering some examples of listening activities and tasks, let’s look
briefly at the kinds of contexts in which listening occurs.

Types of Listening

Nunan (1990) has suggested that listening occurs in four types of contexts, which he
sets out as a matrix (see Figure 6-1). First, it may be one-way, where the listener is not
called upon to respond verbally (such as listening to the radio or to a lecture), or it may
be two-way, where two or more people take on the roles of listener and speaker in turn

104
 Listening

(such as in a conversation). Listening can also broadly involve two types of topic:
everyday interpersonal topics, the sort of everyday chat we all engage in with friends;
and more information-based topics, the kind of talk that occurs in the classroom, or in
contexts where the purpose is to gain information of some kind. Figure 6-1 shows how
these four types of contexts produce a two-by-two matrix. Some examples of each of
the four listening contexts are included.
Note that this is a very simplified picture of listening contexts; in reality the top¬
ics about which people speak cannot be classified so discretely, and it may sometimes
he difficult to discriminate between what might be thought of as “chat” and “informa¬
tion getting.” Nevertheless this matrix does represent the broad range of contexts for
listening, and it is therefore useful as a programming device to check whether students
are experiencing a range of situations in which to practice listening skills.
Generally, the easiest listening context for learners involves the sorts of situations
found in Quadrant A, and to a lesser extent (because the topics may be less familiar)

two-way

QUADRANT A QUADRANTC
Taking part in: Taking part in:
a conversation at a party a job interview
a conversation at the bus a conversation involving
stop about the weather the giving of directions or
instructions
a chatty phone call to a
friend a phone inquiry about
buying a computer
interpersonal information-
topics based topics
QUADRANT D
QUADRANTB
Listening to
Listening to:
the radio or TV news
someone recounting a
personal anecdote a lecture

someone telling a story phone information (e.g.,

a recorded timetable, or
someone telling a joke
instructions for paying
a bill)

one-way
FIGURE 6-1. Contexts for Listening
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Quadrant C. Listening here is two-way, so listeners have a chance to ask for clarifica¬
tion or signal that they don’t understand. And as Chapter 1 suggested, most ESL chil¬
dren quickly learn to talk to others and comprehend what is said to them in
face-to-face contexts, when the talk is about everyday and familiar topics and where
the visual context itself can be an aid to comprehension, such as some of the examples
in Quadrant A.
However, not all situations that fall within this quadrant are easy for learners.
Understanding what is said on the phone can be quite demanding for young learners.
As the discussion about the mode continuum in Chapter 3 suggested, more linguistic
resources are needed the further we move away from “here and now” language. And
so a phone call, even though it is two-way and may be about familiar topics, may be a
difficult task: while speakers must make everything explicit through language alone,
listeners must also reconstruct the intended meaning from language alone. In addition,
they must do it in “real time,” without the time for reflection that is possible in reading.
One-way listening is generally more difficult than two-way because listeners don’t
have an opportunity to ask for clarification, or to slow down the text they are listen¬
ing to. Quadrant D tasks are also likely to involve less familiar topics than those in
Quadrants A and B, and probably represent the most demanding listening tasks for
ESL students.

Implications for Teaching

As the previous section suggests, approaches to the teaching of listening should be pri¬
marily focused on meaning. To this end, here are a selection of listening activities that
can he integrated within your regular program. They are divided into two groups, those
that involve two-way listening and those that involve one-way listening. All the activ¬
ities involve the learners taking some action, since we can never know what is going
on in someone’s head (in this case how well they are comprehending). In this way, it
is only by seeing what a learner does as a result of listening that we can recognize
whether effective listening has taken place.

Introducing How to Listen

Many children in today’s world are unused to quiet, and have never learned to listen
perceptively to specific sounds. In preparation to listening in the educational context,
the following three activities, though not specifically language-based, help to sensitize
children to the need to listen actively and perceptively.

What Can You Hear?

Ask the children to be completely silent. Take some time to let them relax. They might
want to close their eyes. When there is no sound within the classroom, ask them to
listen to see what sounds they can hear: these will be mostly from outside the class¬
room. Give them several minutes to concentrate on this task, and then ask them what

106
 Listening

they heard. Possible answers might involve a dog barking outside, a truck going past,
someone coughing, a baby crying, people talking, a chair squeaking, and so on. As a
follow-up to this task for older students, you could also ask which of these sounds they
would not have heard a hundred years ago.

Sound Bingo

Make a selection of Bingo cards with the names of sounds on them, such as footsteps,
someone laughing, a dog barking, a baby crying, the sound of rain, the sound of traffic,
glass breaking, and so forth. Alternatively, draw pictures to illustrate the sounds. You
will also need a sound tape of these sounds. As children hear a sound, they cover the
word or picture on their card. The first person to have all the pictures covered is the
winner.

Sound Stories

Using a sound tape, play three different sounds to the children. In groups they make
up a story in which all three sounds are significant.

Two-Way Listening

One of the most important things that ESL learners need to be able to do is ask for
clarification when they don’t understand something. So model and practice phrases
like these:

Excuse me, I’d like to ask something.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Can you repeat that?
I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that. Can you say it again, please?
Did you say . . . ?
Sorry for interrupting, but would you mind repeating that?

Remind students to use phrases like these whenever they don’t understand some¬
thing. It is a good idea to have them written up on a poster and displayed, so that their
use becomes a classroom “norm,” both when students are talking to each other and to
you. You do not want your students to become so accustomed to “missing” bits of what
is said that they begin to accept this as an inevitable part of their school experience!
Some students not familiar with Western cultural norms may not be accustomed to
these kinds of interruptions and may see them as extremely impolite, especially to a
teacher. Reassure them that you want to be sure they understand what you say, and
that a polite interruption or a request for clarification will help them do this.
Any interactive problem-solving task is a context for practicing interactive listen¬
ing, for in these situations it is very likely that students will need to work out commu¬
nication difficulties and clarify ideas. The spoken language activities discussed in
Chapter 2 are therefore also listening activities. Some additional activities are

107
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

described next. Remember to encourage the students to ask for clarification or

repetition whenever they need to.

Describe and Draw

This is a barrier game that can be done as a teacher-directed activity or between pairs
of students, or with one student directing the class. One person draws a picture or
series of shapes on a piece of paper. The other students can’t see what is being drawn.
At the same time, the artist gives instructions to a partner about what to do:

Draw a circle in the middle of the paper.

Draw a big triangle on top so that it touches the circle.
Under the circle, draw a . . .
On the left, draw a .. .

“If You Are ...”

This activity is adapted from Rost (1991). Like the previous activity, the students must
follow directions, but this time the directions vary depending on the characteristics of
individual students. It requires students to listen very carefully to the instructions. As
in the previous tasks, encourage students to ask you to repeat or clarify information.
Here is an example.

Write your name on the paper. If you are a boy, write it on the left. If you are a girl, write
it on the right.
Write your telephone number. If you are sitting beside a window, write it in red. If you
are sitting anywhere else, write it in green.
How do you come to school? If you take a bus to school, write the word bus inside a tri¬
angle. If you come by car, write the word car inside a square. If you walk, write the
word walk inside a rectangle.

You can make this quite a complex listening task for older or more able ESL students.

Map Game 1

Give students identical maps, but with some road and building names removed. Map
A should have the information that is not on Map B and vice versa. Collaboratively,
but without showing each other their maps, the students must find out the missing
names using questions like these:

What’s the name of the road opposite the post office1

What building is on the left of the post office1

108
 Listening

Map Game 2
9*

With identical and completed maps, students agree on a starting point. Student A
then directs Student B to a destination unknown to Student B. When the instructions
are complete, the student who has been following the instructions should end up in
the right place! Here’s an example:

Go along the street.

Turn left. You pass the post office on your left.
When you get to the traffic lights, turn right.
Just past the park there is a building.
Where are you?
%

Barrier games like this make ideal interactive listening activities since clarification
questions are almost certain to occur as the listener seeks more information (Did you
say “left”? Can you repeat that? Is it near the station?)

Interviews

These can be based on members of the class, or students may carry our interviews in
order to gain information about a class topic (see Chapter 4). In the process of the
interview, the interviewer will need to focus closely on the interviewee’s responses and
perhaps ask further questions based upon the information that the interviewee is pro-
viding. This situation can provide an authentic and challenging listening task.

Jigsaw Listening

This activity is based on an expert/home grouping and is similar to Jigsaw Reading

described in Chapter 5. (Also see Chapter 2, and the Glossary, for a fuller description.)
You will need to have a cassette player for each group. Like jigsaw reading, each group
has a different set of information (in this case, to listen to) and in which they become
“experts.” Later they are regrouped, share their information with members of their new
group, and listen to others’ information. Different kinds ot information sources can be
used. For example, for a narrative, each group might have a part of the story. Or, if stu¬
dents are collecting factual information, each group might have a section of a report.
One group may have information about the habitat of an animal, one about its feed¬
ing habits, another about what it looks like. Alternatively, each group could have
information about a different animal, and the information could then be pooled. Or
you could base the listening task on a procedural text (see Chapter 4), with each group
having a few steps of the overall procedure. Remember, though, that a listening text
needs to be processed in “real time,” so the texts should not be too long, and they will
probably need to be simpler than for reading. Depending on the difficulty of the text,
you may prefer to let each group listen to the text more than once.

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Split Dictation

Make two gapped versions of a text, with each text having different gaps. In pairs stu¬
dents must complete the text by reading to each other the parts they have, and filling
in the blanks for the parts they don’t have, so that collaboratively they complete the
whole text. Students can take it in turns to read sentence by sentence (see Figure 6-2).
Children should not show each other their papers.

Dictogloss

This is a listening activity that integrates listening with speaking, reading, and writing,
and is described fully in the Glossary.

One'Way Listening

Many reading tasks can be adapted to use as listening tasks. In addition, as we have
seen earlier in the chapter, listening, like reading, is facilitated when students have the

Partner A

1 Insects have caused much suffering_

2 _have died of malaria.

3 This is a disease

4 Insects __•

5 _infects people with sleeping sickness.

6 _spreads bubonic plague .

Partner B

1 for human beings.

2 Millions of people

3 which is spread by mosquitoes.

4 spread many other diseases.

5 The tsetse fly

6 The rat flea

Figure 6-2. Split Dictation

110
 Listening

relevant schematic or “in-the-bead” knowledge. You may find it helpful at this point
to go back to the before-reading activities listed in Chapter 5, since these activities are
as important for listening as they are for reading, and they should form a part of the
preparation for a specific listening task. This is especially the case in one-way listen¬
ing, where learners will not have the opportunity to ask questions.
One-way listening usually involves either listening for a specific piece of informa¬
tion (e.g., listening to a recorded message for the time of a train), or listening with the
aim of getting general information (e.g., listening to the news). Make sure that the
tasks you use provide a balance between these two purposes.

LISTENING FOR SPECIFIC INFORMATION

Hands Up

Give the students a set of questions based on a listening text. As they hear the piece
of information that provides them with the answer, they raise their hands. They should
have a chance to look at the questions before they hear the text.

Information Extraction Task 1: Listening for Facts

Students listen to any documentary program or video that presents a number of facts
and figures. Or they could listen to a recording of bus or train times. Prepare a sheet
in chronological order corresponding to the facts as they are presented. Students must
transfer the information as they listen. For example, if students are listening to infor¬
mation about a country, they listen specifically for particular pieces of information (see
Figure 6-3). Where students already know something about the topic, encourage them
to predict as many of the answers as they can before listening, so that they will be lis¬
tening more actively and confirming or correcting their answers as they listen.

Information Extraction Task 2: Listening for Opinions

Students listen to a recording of a debate (it could be one they took part in or one from
another class). They make notes summarizing only one point of view. This is more
challenging if the “debate” is not a formal one, but a discussion between several people

• Name of a country
• Where it is
• Population
• What language (s) people speak
• Largest city
• 7
• 7

FIGURE 6-3. Information Extraction

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

who may share some points of view but not others. Students must then pay close atten-
tion to what is said in order to extract information appropriately and selectively.

LISTENING FOR GENERAL INFORMATION

Spot the Difference

Record two versions of a story, or “invent” two news bulletins or two procedural texts
that have minor changes of detail. Play one version to the students and ask them to lis-
ten for overall meaning. Play it a second time so that students become familiar with it.
Give students a written version of the same text. Then play the alternative version. Stu¬
dents must “spot the difference” between the written version and the alternative oral
version, and circle the words or phrases on the print version when they hear differences.

Version A
Just as Jack had taken all he could carry, the giant opened one eye and saw Jack. “Who
are you?” he roared. He opened the other eye, and then he stood up. Jack could hardly
see his head, it was so far away. He turned and ran and started to climb down the
beanstalk as fast as he could. The giant strode after him, and Jack felt sure he was
about to die!

Version B
Just as Jill had taken all she could carry, the giant opened one of his eyes and saw Jill.
“Who are you?” he shouted. He opened the other eye, and then he stood up. Jill could
hardly see his head, it was so far away. She turned and ran and began to climb down
the beanstalk as fast as she could. The giant ran after her, and Jill felt sure she was
about to be killed!

Picture Dictation

Students have a number of jumbled pictures that tell a story or give a recount. Read a
text that tells the story in its correct sequence. As you read the text, students put the
pictures in order.

Matching Game (Listening)

Students have several pictures, each labeled with a number. The teacher describes one
of the pictures, giving each description a letter. Students then match the pictures with
the description, saying which number goes with each letter. This is more challenging if
the pictures are similar in most details.

Oral/Aural Cloze

Give students a cloze exercise with random or focused deletions (see discussion of
cloze exercises in Chapter 4 and the Glossary). Read the complete text to the students,
who fill in the blanks.

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 Listening

The Sounds of English

Depending on the particular dialect spoken, English has around forty-four distinctive
sounds or phonemes. Phonemes make a difference to the meaning of a word. For exam¬
ple: bean, bin, Ben, ban, ban, and barn are different in only one sound, the vowel sound
between /b/ and /n/. Similarly, bit, lit, knit, and sit have only one sound difference, the
initial consonant. (Note we are talking about sounds, not letters, so in phonemic terms
the letters kn represent the single sound /n/.) The phonemes of different languages are
rarely exactly the same, although many phonemes in the student’s first language may
be close. Most second language learners, especially in the early stages of learning the
language, make use of the closest sound in their own language when the English
phoneme is unfamiliar (and they probably “hear” it as the sound in their own language,
too). For example, they may use the phoneme /s/ for the th sound at the beginning of
words like think and thing. Or they may not be able to produce the distinction between
some of the vowel sounds noted here. This is usually what is happening when we talk
of someone having a “foreign accent.” In reality, young children rarely continue to
have problems with the pronunciation of English once they begin to become familiar
with the language, and as Chapter 1 pointed out, many learners very quickly begin to
sound like native speakers. In later life, although older learners have other advantages
in learning a second language, this ability to learn a new set of phonemes decreases
considerably.
Another aspect of spoken English that students may find hard to master is its stress
system. In connected speech, many languages have equal stress on every syllable,
whereas English stresses some syllables but not others. In this sentence, the stressed
syllables are marked. Say that sentence and note how the underlined words receive
more stress. Notice also how the vowel in the word are “weakens”-—that is, it changes
from the way it would be pronounced if you said it in isolation. Most “function words”
or grammatical words change, or weaken, in this way, because they are not normally
stressed in connected speech. Compare how you might say the following words in iso¬
lation and in a sentence, and notice how the vowels weaken. Be sure to speak as nat¬
urally as possible.

Was. She was playing.

Have. They have finished. (Probably further reduced to they’ve).
To. Give it back to him.
From. He’s just got back from his holiday in Italy.

Sometimes you may feel it necessary to focus specifically on the sounds of English,
and also on its stress and intonation patterns. The following activities provide some
ways to provide this practice. Note that focusing on sounds is closely related to pro¬
nunciation practice.

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Minimal Pair Exercises

In these activities, the focus is on differentiating between pairs of words that differ only
in one sound, such as the ones below (see Gibbons 1993). Give students a list of pairs
of words (such as three, tree; bin, bean; bin, pin; cat, cap; thing, sing). They listen to one
of the two words being read and circle on their list the one they think they hear. (For
younger children, you could use two drawings rather than words.) Such exercises may
be useful for some older learners who may find new sounds difficult to hear or to pro¬
nounce, and who are also likely to be more conscious of sounding “different,” but in
general, try to provide a greater contextualization for a task like this. After all, we
rarely listen to words in isolation in real life, and, as we have seen, we use contextual
clues to help us “hear” a sound correctly. You should also ask yourself these questions:

• Do these sounds make it difficult for the student to comprehend what is said to
him or her?
• Does the student’s pronunciation of these sounds actually make comprehen¬
sion difficult for a listener?

If the answer is no, consider whether such exercises are really relevant. In any case,
remember that such focused practice is better done regularly but in small doses, per¬
haps for a few minutes a day.
A more contextualized version of this activity is to locate the words the students
are listening to within a whole text, focusing on minimal pairs of words. For example,
students hear pairs of sentences like these:

1. A. On his way to market, Jack met an old man who offered to exchange Jack’s
cow for some bins.
B. On his way to market, Jack met an old man who offered to exchange Jack’s
cow for some beans.

2. A. The beanstalk was as thick as a tree.

B. The beanstalk was as sick as a tree.

The response sheet has only the number of the question, and the letters A and B. Chil¬
dren mark or circle the answer that they think they hear. Encourage them to think
about the meaning too. For a small group of students, or individuals, it may be more
effective to record the two versions, so that they have a chance to listen several times.
Again, they mark the one that best makes sense.

Word Linking

Learners also need to be able to recognize critical grammatical markers, such as past
tense or plural endings. This may be difficult for some children who come from

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 Listening

languages where final consonants are not fully “released.” Many Asian speakers, for
example, may have difficulties with the sounds /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ in English when
they occur at the end of a word. Learners’ speech will he less “staccatodike” in these
contexts if you get them to consciously link the end of one word with the beginning of
the next. For example:

Get it out please. Ge-ti-tout please.

Put it in the bin. Pu-ti-tin the bin.
He said I could take it. He sai-dl-could-ta-kit.

Jazz chants and poems are especially good for this activity. (Note that the sounds
of English spoken in different parts of the world vary, and the letter t may be pro-
nounced close to /d/ in parts of North America and Australia, but the “linking” prin¬
ciple described here remains.)

Say It Again

This activity is adapted from Rost (1991), who suggests it for focusing on phonologi¬
cal features, stress, and intonation. First, select a scene from a video that the children
will enjoy or find memorable, or that has high interest for them. This could be an
excerpt from a children’s television drama or feature film. Students should be familiar
with the overall story line, so it would be better to use a video that they have previ¬
ously watched.
Select some lines spoken by the characters in the video; these are the lines that
students are later going to practice. The lines should be in chronological order but
should not occur all together. Write the lines on a chart so there will be a whole-class
focus on them. Next:

• Play the excerpt to the children.

• After they have watched the video, ask them to say the sentences on the chart.
Ask if they can remember who said them, and where they occurred.
• Play the scene a second time while the students listen for the sentences. Have
them raise their hand each time they hear one. Stop the tape at this point and
ask them to repeat the line, exactly as it was said. Pay attention to all aspects of
pronunciation, including stress, intonation, and vowel weakening. They may
need several rehearsals with you!
• Play the scene a third time. This time, stop the tape before the selected lines.
The students say the line as you point to it. After several repetitions, continue
the tape until just before the next line. Encourage the students to say the lines
in character, not simply to repeat them as an exercise.
• If students are enjoying the activity, play the tape once more and have individ¬
ual students say the lines from memory.

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Shadow Reading

Tape a short story, and give students a copy of one paragraph. They first listen to the
story all the way through. Then play only the paragraph, stopping after each sentence
to give students a chance to repeat it. As for Say It Again, they should try to copy your
pronunciation, stress, intonation, and pace as closely as possible. When the whole of the
paragraph has been rehearsed in this way, students 1 shadow the tape by reading along
with it, remembering to pay attention to the stress and intonation patterns. This stage
may be better done as individual work so that children can proceed at their own pace.

In Summary
As Rost (1991) points out, progress in listening provides a basis for the development
of other language skills, and is involved in many language-learning activities. The
activities in this chapter are based on a number of principles. Being aware of these may
help in the design of other activities in your own classroom:

• Listening ability develops in both one-way and two-way contexts. There should
be a balance of both in an effective listening program.
• Just as it is possible to read in more than one way (such as skimming and scan¬
ning) , so it is possible to listen in different ways (such as for specific informa¬
tion or for overall gist). Again, teaching and learning activities should reflect
these purposes.
• Learning to ask for clarification is integral to interactive listening.
• Noticing the form of words, being able to discriminate sounds, and being able
to recognize stress and intonation patterns are part of learning to listen accu¬
rately. However, learners can often focus on these aspects of listening in the
context of meaning-oriented activities.
• Listening ability develops where there is a real purpose for listening, and where
the focus is on listening for meaning. And so, in the ESL context, the teaching
of listening skills fits naturally into all curriculum areas. Designing listening
tasks in the context of understanding and learning subject “content” provides
authentic situations across the curriculum for listening skills to be developed.

And one final point. Becoming a good listener yourself is all-important. If we want
children to become good listeners, we must ourselves become active listeners of what
they say to us. Model effective listening by clarifying and checking that you have
understood what children are saying. Reflect this back to them, and build on their
responses as an interested conversational partner. This behavior demonstrates the
importance you place on active listening, and it is one of the most positive ways you
can develop your students’ listening abilities.

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 Listening

Suggestions for Further Reading

NUNAN, D. 1990. “Learning to Listen in a Second Language.” Prospect 5 (2): 7-23.

NuNAN, D., and L. MILLER, eds. 1995. New Ways in Teaching Listening. Alexandria, VA:
Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

ROST, M. 1991. Listening in Action. New York: Prentice Hall.

117
 7
Learning Language, Learning Through
Language, and Learning About Language
Developing an Integrated Curriculum

What ESL learners are entitled to is the best available

environment for language and cognitive development.
Given the language'rich, child'centred quality of
kindergarten and primary [elementary] practice . . .
there is little doubt that in the early years of schooling,
the mainstream classroom forms the best basis for this.
John Clegg, Mainstreaming ESL: Case Studies in
Integrating ESL Students into the Mainstream
Curriculum

The Curriculum: A Context for Language Learning

This chapter brings together the ideas in this book and discusses some of the ways in
which ESL teaching can be integrated into the regular classroom. Part of the title of
the chapter comes from a paper by Michael Halliday entitled “Three Aspects of Chil¬
dren’s Language Development: Learning Language, Learning Through Language and
Learning About Language.” These three aspects of language development are brought
together in a classroom program that integrates curriculum and language learning.
In the past, ESL teaching was often quite separate from whatever was going on in
the mainstream curriculum. Students followed a special program, for which they were
usually withdrawn from their classroom on a regular basis. This language program was
often organized around sets of grammatical structures (e.g., the present continuous
tense, the past tense, the present tense, prepositions, etc.) or around language func¬
tions (e.g., generalizing, classifying, hypothesizing, expressing time, expressing location,
etc.). Such approaches rely on the deliberate creation of contexts for using the lan¬
guage. Lor example, to practice the kinds of conditional language associated with
hypothesizing (such as if we were ... we would . . .), a typical exercise might require
children to think of six items they would need if they were stranded on an island (the

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

assumption being that this would elicit language such as we would need . . . we would
take . . .). While this may seem a communicative language learning task, in that the
language is being used for some purpose, there may be no rationale as to why this is a
particularly relevant or meaningful piece of language for children to be learning at that
point in time. Nor may the task itself have anything to do with the particular subject
learning in which children are engaged back in their regular classroom. And often in
programs designed simply to teach language, there may be a sequence of such exercises
where the somewhat artificial contexts and random choice of language items bear no
relationship with each other, nor to what is being learned at that time in the main¬
stream curriculum.
Of course, for some newly arrived children, a short daily withdrawal program may
still be valuable, provided that the focus language in these classes is related to the
mainstream curriculum. Students new to the school and to English, or who are very
shy or traumatized, may gain confidence and become familiar and comfortable with
their new surroundings more easily in this way. It may also be less threatening for them
to learn in a small group rather than in a whole class, and they will have many more
opportunities to interact on a one-to-one basis with a teacher.
However, this chapter is based on the view that for most ESL learners, the regular
classroom offers the best opportunity to learn a second language. In particular, the reg¬
ular classroom provides a cultural and situational context for a focus on those aspects
of the second language most relevant to curriculum learning.

Why Integrate?

Language teaching methodologies have generally accepted the notion that language
teaching is more effective when learners are presented with meaningful language in
context, and the integration of ESL learning with curriculum content is now broadly
accepted as supportive of second language learning (Short 1993). There are a number
of reasons why this is the approach taken here.

• First, the integration of language and content is consistent with the notion that
language is learned through meaningful use in a variety of contexts. The sub¬
ject matter of the curriculum provides those contexts, and thus a rationale for
what language to teach. From a language-teaching perspective, then, the cur¬
riculum can be seen as providing authentic contexts for the development of
subject-specific genres and registers. In short, an integrated program takes a
functional approach to language and places its teaching focus on language as
the medium of learning, rather than on language as something separate front
content.
• Second, as discussed in Chapter 1, there is evidence that it can take between
five and seven years for ESL students to match their English-speaking peers in
the effective use of the academic registers of school. Clearly, if this is the case,
concurrent teaching and learning of both subject matter and language is a way

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

of speeding up this process, and helping to ensure that children’s classroom

time is spent as usefully as possible.
• Third, nonintegrated approaches—instruction in language alone—is usually
insufficient to enable children to succeed in mainstream studies (Adamson
1993; Richards and Hurley 1990; Collier 1995). As we noted earlier, if children
are following a separate ESL program, there is a risk that there will he little rela¬
tionship between the language being presented in the language class, and the
language required for children to access and participate in curriculum learning.
Since language is best learned in the service of other learning, the mainstream
curriculum is an obvious source for language development: as one educator
puts it, “Why go to the trouble of artificially recreating the mainstream class¬
room [in withdrawal classes] when the real thing is available next door?” (Clegg
1996, 10).
• In addition, situating language teaching within a curriculum area has the
potential to support both language and curriculum learning, in a reciprocal way.
With a dual content-language focus, there is likely to be a continuous recycling
of concepts, grammar, or vocabulary associated with particular curriculum
knowledge. As we saw in Chapter 5, prior knowledge or familiarity with a topic
greatly facilitates language comprehension and language learning. Equally,
language-based tasks in a subject area can effectively recycle particular cur¬
riculum concepts and knowledge in the process of focusing on relevant text
types, registers, grammar, and vocabulary. In other words, “the curriculum is the
hook on which to hang language development and vice versa” (Clegg 1996, 15).
• Finally, it is important to recognize the benefits to all students of a culturally
and linguistically diverse classroom, and a culturally inclusive and language-
aware curriculum. As Clegg (1996) points out, “the language-rich diet of an
ESL group can turn out to be nourishing for the whole mainstream class. It can
help all the children use language for learning in ways which were not previ¬
ously available to them” (12). We should recognize that separate provision for
ESL students impoverishes the school as a whole: it reinforces monoculturalism
and puts the school at odds with the reality of the culturally diverse society in
which it is situated. In the world of the twenty-first century, all children will
increasingly need, as one writer puts it, to “navigate difference.”

As we pointed out in Chapter 1, however, merely placing children in the main¬

stream classroom does not ensure they will learn the language of instruction. Good
content teaching is not necessarily good language teaching, and at the same time, sub¬
ject teaching must go beyond the concerns of the language specialist. An integrated
program takes a functional approach to language, systematically relating it to the uses
of language in the curriculum, so that curriculum topics will have both subject and
specific language aims. When this occurs, the curriculum can provide an authentic
context for meaningful and purposeful language use. There are a range of ways in
which integration has been interpreted and organized (for excellent summaries of

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

these, see Davison and Williams 2001, 58-59;. and Clegg 1996, 22). This chapter offers
a further example of how this integration can occur.

Integrating Language and Subject Learning:

What Do We Need to Know First?

In this section we 11 look at the kind of information that needs to he gathered prior to
actual classroom planning. There are two sets of information that form the basis for the
planning of a program that integrates second language learning and curriculum learn¬
ing. They are the responses to these two questions:

• What are the language demands of the curriculum?

• What do children currently know about language, and what are their language¬
learning needs?

The first question requires “finding the language” in the subjects and topics that chil¬
dren are studying. The second requires finding out about children’s current language
abilities. In the following two sections, we’ll look at each of these areas.

Finding the Language in the Curriculum

First, think about the topics or units of work that you are currently working with in
your classroom program. Examples of “topics” or “unit of work” could be: our neigh¬
borhood, small creatures, electricity, the water cycle, a local issue, producing a class
paper, making a school garden, symmetry and patterning, designing a kite.
Most teachers are accustomed to thinking about planning for subject learning in
terms of the content, tasks, and resources they will use, and program objectives are fre¬
quently thought of in terms of subject learning. Although most teachers are aware of
the importance of language in the classroom, it is often not explicitly planned for
across the curriculum. The temptation is to look “through” language to the content.
Figure 7-1 provides a series of questions designed to help you think about the language
that is integral to a particular curriculum topic. These questions are not intended to
be definitive. Nor is it suggested that you take account of every question in every unit
of work. Rather, they are intended to prompt you to think about your program through
the “lens” of language, to help you hold language up to the light, to look at it rather
than through it.
The questions aim to do two things. First, they aim to help you identify the lan¬
guage demands of a particular topic or area of study, and to determine what language
children would need to know in order to participate in learning in that curriculum
topic. Second, they aim to help you identify if and where opportunities for language
development are being missed, such as to draw attention to a missed opportunity to
develop listening skills. Each set of questions is headed with a reference to the chapter

121
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

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122
 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

in which the particular issues are dealt with. You may wish to add other questions of
your own.
Figure 7—2 is a worked example of the kinds of responses you might make to these
questions. The topic is “A Local Issue,” and it is adapted from a program from
Creenaune and Rowles (1996). Creenaune and Rowles give the following as examples
of local issues that have relevance to students’ lives: aircraft noise under a flight path,
a proposed local development in an environmentally sensitive area, demolition of a
historic building, the preservation of an endangered species, the threatened closure of
an important community service or facility, a campaign to improve local facilities for
young people. Creenaune and Rowles include the following objectives for this unit:

after thorough examination of all the arguments surrounding an issue, students will be
encouraged to develop an informed position with supporting arguments and express
this position in authentic forums, for example, writing to a newspaper or to local
politicians, speaking at a school assembly or producing articles for the school maga-
zine. (43-47)

In Figure 7-2, the left-hand column is a selection of the planned teaching and
learning activities that would be included in such a topic. (Details of the particular
issue have not been included since this would depend on the local situation.) The
right-hand column “unpacks” these to identify what language knowledge and use is
required in order to carry them out. It thus represents a “language inventory”—the
language that is integral to planned teaching activities—and answers the first of the
questions raised earlier: what are the language demands of the curriculum?
We will return to this language inventory later. At this point, let’s turn to the sec¬
ond major question: what do children currently know about language, and what are
their language-learning needs? This is the subject of the next section.

Finding Out About Children’s Language

The second set of information focuses on the current language abilities of the chil¬
dren—what they are already able to do with language and the areas in which they
need help. This is the information that effective language assessment practices pro¬
vide. Central to the notion of assessment here is the principle that the information it
provides should be used to inform subsequent teaching and learning activities, and
that it is an ongoing process that occurs in the context of the everyday activities of the
classroom. It aims ultimately to support learning, not—as may be a risk with stan¬
dardized tests—to “legitimize the location of the ‘problem’ within students” (Cummins
2000).
Though there may be a place at times for the kind of information that standard¬
ized tests are able to provide, probably the most useful language assessment for teach¬
ers is that which provides information about children’s mastery of the language of the
classroom, in particular when it indicates the areas in which they currently require

123
 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Planned Teaching and Finding the Language

Learning Activities

Brainstorm what children know about Vocabulary for topic

issue and record ideas

Get information: write to key people or Letters of request

organizations to request information Use of politeness forms:
We would be grateful if.. .
Could you please . . .

Collect and read pamphlets, newspaper Skimming and scanning skills

articles, or other published material and Summarizing
make notes Notetaking

Visit site/display areas and write a Writing a recount

recount of the visit Use of past tense
Use of appropriate connectives (of time): first,
next, afterwards, finally

Interview or invite key people to the Formulating questions for interview

school to speak about the issue from Asking the interviewee questions in an
their perspective appropriate manner

Share all information with peers Giving an oral report

Listening skills: listening for key information

Examine similarities and differences Use of comparison and contrast: X argues . . .

between viewpoints of stakeholders whereas Y argues . . .

Small-group class discussions Voicing disagreement politely: I don’t fully agree

with you, in my opinion
Presenting opinions: I’d like to say, I’d like to add,
in my opinion
Using appropriate connectives for supporting
arguments: first, second, finally

Address school assembly or other classes Presenting an oral report

about the issue • Using appropriate schematic structure
• Presentation skills

Write letters to the local newspaper or Writing an argument

articles for school newspaper presenting Use of appropriate schematic structure
opinions Use of appropriate connectives for presenting
arguments: first, second, therefore, in conclusion

FIGURE 7—2. A Significant Local Issue: A Language “Inventory”

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

support. This kind of assessment is intended to be ongoing and formative, not to “place”
children in relation to each other or be used as a summative “test.” The aim is to pro-
vide you with useful information about the current language development of children
that in turn will feed into subsequent teaching and learning activities. Such ongoing
assessment is by its nature context specific, and so it will indicate to tbe teacher the
level and kind of scaffolding that is most relevant for particular tasks.
Ongoing classroom assessment can occur in a number of ways, many of them
informal, and many of which you probably already use. They include:

• Your observation of how children work and interact with others, such as how
far they make use of environmental print around the room, their level of inter¬
est in reading and writing, and how confident they are in speaking.
• Your interaction with individual children, such as talking with them about how
they have gone about solving a problem, listening to how they have reasoned a
math task, discussing their understanding of what they are reading.
• The outcomes of listening, reading, speaking, and writing tasks.
• Portfolios of work.
• Children’s own self-assessments.

All of these are valuable in helping build up a profile of a learner’s language use.
It is also useful to carry out more systematic analyses of the language children
actually produce when they speak and write; this information is especially important
for the planning of an integrated program. The section on assessment in Chapter 4 is
an example of how this can be done. It describes how children’s writing can be assessed
against criteria that are specific to a particular text type. In the same way, any learning
task in which children are involved—including every activity described in the
Glossary—can simultaneously be an assessment task. Here are two further examples of
how regular classroom activities can be used as a means of assessing what children are
able to do and where they need support. (For additional examples, see Gibbons 1992.)

ASSESSMENT TASK FOR SPEAKING: PAIRED PROBLEM SOLVING

One activity described in Chapter 2 was paired problem solving. The task requires
students to work in pairs to solve one of two problems (the examples given in Chapter
2 were to design a paper boat that would keep afloat twenty marbles, and to design a
mobile). Having come to a solution, two pairs cross-question each other about their
solutions to their respective problems, prior to solving the second problem themselves.
If this activity were also to be used as an assessment task, note that the aim would be
to focus on the language involved in doing the task, rather than on the “best” solution
to the problem. With this in mind, let’s consider the kinds of criteria you may want to
apply to evaluate what counts as a “successful” performance. (Note that assessment of
children’s spoken language is easier if the talk is audiotaped. This can also be played
back to children as a way of having them reflect on their own performance.)

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

First, think about what this task requires children to be able to do, in linguistic
terms. It requires them to describe their problem, and then to report their solution.
The reporting will require them to use the past tense, to use appropriate vocabulary
(e.g., tore, broke, fell apart, sunk, floated, flat-bottomed, pointed), and to give reasons for
the various solutions they have tried (e.g., We did that because we thought. . .). The task
will also require children to ask appropriate questions about the other pair s problem
and solution (e.g., So, what happened1 What did you do then?). And, as a significant part
of the task, it will require them to give advice appropriately (e.g., You could . . . Have
you tried . . . —ing? Do you think you should have . . . ? Perhaps it would be better if. . .).
And it is likely that they will also need to be able to acknowledge this advice (e.g.,
That’s a good idea; We could try that; No, I don’t think that will work because . . .).
Of course, what you are doing when you “unpack” a task in this way is also an
example of “finding the language in the curriculum,” and you may wish to take
account of this in your classroom planning. Used as an assessment procedure, these
examples of task-related language can be translated into a set of criteria by which a
learner’s language can be assessed. Figure 7-3 is a worked example of this and illus¬
trates how one child (Mario) was assessed.
At the same time, it’s important to note that if a learner doesn’t fulfill one of these
criteria, it does not necessarily indicate an inability to use language in this way. For
example, let’s say the child did not offer advice to the other pair. This only shows that,
in this context, the learner didn’t indicate whether or not he or she could offer advice.
Perhaps the child simply chose not to. So it is important not to overgeneralize about
learners’ abilities on the basis of context-specific tasks.
On the other hand, if assessment is an ongoing process and takes into account a
range of contexts in which learners use language, such assessment procedures gradu¬
ally build up to form a profile of how learners use language in the classroom. The
assessment in Figure 7-3 indicates that Mario was able to report what he and his part¬
ner did, but had difficulty in using the kind of modulation by which English speakers
offer advice: you could ... it might be better if.. . maybe you should . . . and so forth.

ASSESSMENT TASK FOR READING: CLOZE EXERCISE

There are many ways to assess reading, and many resources and books available on the
subject. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss reading assessment in detail. Pop¬
ular ways of assessing children include using anecdotal records, miscue analysis, reading
conferences, children’s own reading logs, audiotapes of oral readings, teacher-student
conferences, and retelling or rewriting what has been read (see Earnest Garcia 1994). As
in the previous example for assessing spoken language, the purpose here is simply to show
how a regular teaching activity can be used for the purpose of assessment.
Since it has been mentioned several times in this book, we will look at how cloze
activities can be used in this way. Cloze tests were originally developed to reflect the
theory that reading entails the prediction of what will come next, and were discussed
as teaching (rather than testing) procedures in Chapter 5, and in the Glossary. Again,

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Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

while regular deletions throughout the text (for example, every sixth or seventh word)
may give general information about a reader’s overall understanding of the text, a well-
constructed cloze with selective deletions can give you more specific information about
children’s reading strategies. It can tell you about what kinds of strategies children are
using to gain meaning from text, such as using backward referencing (using the preced¬
ing text to find a clue) or forward referencing (looking ahead in the text to find a clue).
Children who are unable to use backward and forward referencing will read word by
word, and they will probably be unable to carry meaning within or across sentences.
Cloze activities can also be used to focus on whether a learner understands criti¬
cal grammatical markers, such as connectives that link ideas and signal the logical
development of a text. A cloze exercise based on an argument or discussion text (see
Chapter 4) could be used for this purpose. In this case, grammatical deletions would
include the logical connectives in the text, such as first, second, finally, on the other hand,
however, therefore.
A few words of warning, however. First, as we have seen, the process of reading
depends greatly on the reader’s current level of knowledge of the topic, and familiar¬
ity with the type of genre. If your aim is to assess a child’s comprehension ability to
process text, then ensure that for assessment purposes the topic and genre are familiar
ones, so that as far as possible you are focusing on the child’s linguistic understandings
(rather than on possible “gaps” in the child’s cultural or world knowledge in relation
to the text). Second, remember that at least the first and last sentences of a cloze exer¬
cise should be complete, since without these the reader has an unrealistic reading task,
in being required to understand a text that lacks a clear context.

Planning a Unit That Integrates Language and Curriculum Learning

At this point you have made a “language inventory” of what the topic will require chil¬
dren to be able to do—the linguistic demands that will be made on them—and you
have a considerable amount of information through ongoing formal and informal
assessment about what children are currently able to do (including some of the areas
where they still need support). These two sets of information form the basis of an inte¬
grated program. Before discussing its development, I will reiterate some key pedagogi¬
cal principles for promoting second language learners’ linguistic and cognitive
development, and the growth of critical literacy skills.
Cummins (2000) suggests three interrelated areas as critical to such a pedagogy:

1. A focus on meaning. This requires input, or the language that children listen to
or read, to be comprehensible. It also includes the development of critical
literacy.
2. A focus on language. This includes the development of children’s awareness of
language forms and uses, and the ability to critically analyze these.

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

3. A focus on use. This involves using language to transform what has been
learned, through generating new knowledge, creating literature and art, and
acting on social realities.

Integral to each of these—and congruent with the socio-cultural view of learning that
informs the discussion throughout this book—is the acknowledgment that student
learning is inseparable from the interactions between teachers and learners.

A Framework for Planning

The framework for planning an integrated unit takes these principles into account,
and it also draws on the earlier discussion relating to the language demands of the cur¬
riculum and the language needs of the children (see Figure 7-4). The framework is
intended to provide an ESL focus to a mainstream program, and to be a supplement to
your normal program, not to replace it. In addition, it is intended to fulfill two
purposes:

1. To facilitate joint planning, where two teachers—an ESL teacher and a class¬
room teacher—plan and/or teach a class collaboratively.
2. To help a classroom teacher who is working alone to plan systematically for the
needs of the second language learners in her class.

The framework in Figure 7-4 has been partially completed for an upper elemen¬
tary class studying the “local issue” topic discussed earlier. (For a similar example with
a younger class, see Gibbons 1993.) The particular issue for this class was centered
around the local park, which also had a swimming pool that many of the children vis¬
ited regularly. A proposal had been put forward by the local council to develop part of
the park space as a multistory parking lot to serve the local shopping area. Community
feeling was split over this, and the local newspaper at the time was a source for letters
both supporting and opposing the development, and for articles and editorials. Other
material included a plan of the proposed development at the local library, and the local
council newsletter.

BOXES A AND B: STUDENT NEEDS AND CURRICULUM DEMANDS

Box A summarizes the information about the students gained from ongoing assess¬
ment, and Box B represents the language inventory for the topic (see Figure 7-2 for a
summary of the planned teaching activities). It should be noted, though, that not all
the needs identified through assessment can be addressed at once! Indeed, the nature
of the topic may mean that it is not the appropriate vehicle to focus on some language
areas. For example, although narrative structure has been identified in this class as an
area of difficulty, this topic is probably not going to provide an authentic context for
that to be a relevant language focus at this point in time. Integration cannot be forced:

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

A. Students’ Language Development Needs B. Language Inventory (language demands of

the topic)

Figure 7-4. A Framework for the Integration of Language and Content

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

if a particular text type or grammatical item has not been identified in your language
inventory, it is better to address that particular area of language in another unit. It is
likely, however, that the local issue topic will provide authentic contexts for some of
the areas identified as children’s language learning needs. Links have been drawn to
indicate these areas of “match.” They include:

• The structure of written discussions.

• The use of connectives and conjunctions within this text type (presenting an
opinion in a letter to the editor of a local paper).
• Skimming and scanning skills (in reading relevant pamphlets or informational
material).
• Summarizing information.
• Listening for key information.
• Giving opinions and expressing agreement and disagreement.

These areas, then, have been chosen as the language focuses for this topic because
they are both relevant to the needs of the children and congruent with the language
demands of the topic.

BOX C: DEVELOPING THE FOCUS LANGUAGE

The next decision is how to develop this focus language. Box C lists the particular lan¬
guage tasks that are intended to model the focus language and to give opportunities
for students to use it. All the activities listed here have been introduced throughout
the book and are listed in the Glossary, but you will probably be able to think of oth¬
ers. These activities are the means by which the focus language is translated into
meaningful teaching and learning activities that are relevant both to the language
needs of the students and to the topic being studied.
Box C thus represents:

• The scaffolding by which learners are helped to access the language identified
in Box B.
• The means by which teachers can respond to some of the language needs iden¬
tified in Box A, in the context of the mainstream curriculum.
• The language focus for the unit.

BOX D: EVALUATION

Box D is the evaluation of the unit. There may be many things you wish to evaluate: for
example, the resources used, students’ enjoyment of the unit, their ability to work col-
laboratively, and the relevance and design of the tasks, as well as what students have

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

learned. Again, the framework is not intended to replace this broad evaluation, simply
to add to it. The information Box D contains will reflect the initial identification of
children’s language-learning needs and the demands of the curriculum that is, it
relates to what has been identified in Box A and Box B. Broadly, in this unit, it will
address questions such as whether or not the children are now better able to:

• Structure an argument.
• Use appropriate connectives to present ideas in an argument.
• Skim and scan for information.
• Summarize information.

Consider also the issues raised in Chapter 1 about the need for appropriate scaffolding
and choice of tasks. In reflecting on your own role as a teacher, ask yourself these ques¬
tions:

• Did the program build on and link to what children already know?
• Did teaching and learning tasks sufficiently extend learners beyond what they
could already do?
• Was adequate and appropriate scaffolding provided so that tasks could be suc¬
cessfully completed?
• Is there evidence that children have developed new concepts or reached new
levels of understanding, such that they will be able to use these in new contexts
and for their own purposes?

Phonics, Spelling, and Grammar: Where Do They Fit in an Integrated

Unit?

The final sections of this chapter address a number of related questions that concern
many teachers, particularly those who are committed to teaching language in ways
that recognize its wholeness and see it as a system for meaning making. Many teach¬
ers ask themselves:

• Is it still relevant to focus on phonics, spelling, and grammar?

• Is it possible to focus on them within an integrated meaning-focused approach?

To both these questions, my own response would he yes: as most teachers would
agree, there is a place for the teaching of phonics, spelling, and grammar—in other
words, for a focus on language as “object.” There is a place for children to learn about
language, as well as to learn it and to learn through it. The critical question, of course,
is how this can be done in ways that do not compromise interactive and meaning-
driven classroom practices.

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

It is useful to bear in mind three principles:

1. Move from whole to part.

2. Move from meaning to form.
3. Move from familiar to unfamiliar.

And, for all three principles, we should add “and back again”! To form a metaphor
for these principles, imagine yourself standing on a hillside looking out across a
panoramic view, with a pair of binoculars in your hand. In front of you are fields,
mountains, and forests. In the far distance, you can glimpse the sea and a boat. Your
first gaze is at the whole vista ahead of you, the overall view from where you are stand-
ing. But after a while, you use your binoculars to focus in on a particular part of the
view, to hone in on a detail of the landscape. (You know how to locate this detail,
where to train your binoculars, because you have already seen it as a part of the whole.)
When you have finished focusing on these details you will probably savor the whole
panorama again, but this time with an enhanced sense of what is there.
In this scenario, what you almost certainly would not do is look through the binoc¬
ulars before you have first looked at the view and located an area to focus on. Neither
would you turn around and point the binoculars behind you! (Because, of course, if
you did either of these things, you wouldn’t really know what you were looking at.)
To return this idea to the classroom, imagine the topic you are working on to be
the view. Your overall aim is for students to construct knowledge and develop under¬
standings about the topic, and to use language meaningfully and purposefully. But this
does not prevent you, in the course of the topic, from “training the binoculars” by help¬
ing your students focus “close up” on a detail of language: a point of grammar, some
phonic knowledge, a spelling pattern, the schematic structure of a particular genre, or
a group of connectives and conjunctions. (Remember, you have already identified
these through the language inventory of the topic and through what you know about
students’ language needs.) You may wish to spend some time on this “close-up view,”
but while you are doing so both you and the students know where these “parts” fit into
the “whole,” and how the focus on form is related to the meanings being made.
Approaching the teaching of forms and parts in this way puts grammar, spelling, and
phonics where they belong: as worthy objects of study in the service of meaning mak¬
ing and learning. In other words, learning about language is most meaningful when it
occurs in the context of language-in-use. Figure 7-5 illustrates this idea.
The “hourglass” here illustrates how the focus of teaching and learning changes
throughout the teaching of a topic, with the “narrowing” of the hourglass representing
a focus on language itself. Teaching and learning activities move at times from learn¬
ing through language, to learning about language, to once more learning through lan¬
guage. In other words, teaching progresses from meaning to form, from whole to part,
and back again. The focus on “language as object” is in the context of the overall

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

Figure 7-5. Focusing on Language as “Object”

meanings being made and the curriculum knowledge being constructed. As discussed
earlier, the choice of what aspects of grammar, spelling, or phonic knowledge to focus
on will already have been determined by the choice of language focus for the topic, but
it may be that in the course ot the unit of work, you will have identified other language
aspects of the topic that you wish to address.

Teaching Phonemic Awareness and Spelling: Recognizing Analogies

Some researchers have shown a strong relationship between children’s awareness of

phonemic patterns (the relationships between sounds and letters) and their ability to
rhyme (see Bryant and Bradley 1985; Goswani and Bryant 1990). Children’s rhyming
skills appear to be good predictors of later spelling and reading success. A child who is
good at rhyming may realize that shared sounds between words, such as hat and rat,
often also mean shared spelling patterns. Later on, they may work out how to recog¬
nize or spell a word that they have not seen before through analogies with more

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

familiar words. (For example, knowing how to read or spell light may help them read or
spell fright.) Being able to form generalizations about how words are read or spelled,
through analogy, is a reasoning process that is essential for developing phonemic aware-
ness in reading and recognition of orthography (spelling patterns) in writing.
The use of rhymes and hooks containing rhyme are likely to be helpful for all chil¬
dren learning to read and write. Being able to recognize words that rhyme and to be
helped to produce rhymes is probably especially useful for children who are less famil¬
iar with the sounds of the language. (At the same time, note that books containing
large numbers of “nonsense” rhyming words may initially be very confusing for ESL
learners.)
The teaching of phonemic awareness (knowledge of letter-sound relationships) and
spelling is usually seen as of particular significance for younger grades, although many
older ESL learners may also need a specific focus on these aspects of language too. Once
again, the principles of whole to part, and familiar to unfamiliar, are important ones.

TEACHING PHONEMIC AWARENESS

An alphabetic system uses letters as symbols for sounds, so that it is possible for a
reader to use letter-sound relationships in decoding words. As discussed in Chapter 5,
this is one of several reading strategies that children need to acquire. However, in En¬
glish, letter-sound relationships do not always help, since they are not always consis¬
tent. Children therefore need to become aware that letter-sound relationships lead to
possibilities, rather than certainties! Learning about phonic generalizations can help
children in two ways:

1. When readers meet a word they do not know, one of several strategies they
need to use is checking their prediction against the first letter or letter cluster
of the word (see Chapter 5). Phonic knowledge is essential for this.
2. Sometimes it is possible for an unknown word to be “sounded out” by the
reader. If the word is already known aurally, this process may allow the reader
to recognize the word.

However, letters and sounds in isolation are very abstract concepts, even for
native speakers, and introducing individual letters, letter clusters, or blends out of a
meaningful context is an even more abstract task for a student who is unfamiliar with
the language and the sounds of the language. Therefore, as a general approach, embed
any focus on phonics teaching within familiar material that is meaningful to the
learner. A Big Book that has been read several times is a useful vehicle for phonics
teaching. The following process provides one example of a simplified procedure to use
with beginning readers that illustrates how phonemic awareness can be developed
inductively, using the three principles of moving from known to unknown, from whole
to part, and from meaning to form. (You would probably want to add other related
activities as well.)

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

• Choose a book that you have already read several times with children (and with
which they can now probably join in as you read). Select a sentence relevant to
the phonic knowledge you want to focus on. Read it together with the children,
pointing to the words as you read. For example: Run, run, as fast as you can, you
can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!
• From the sentence, select a word containing the relevant letters and sounds you
wish to focus on. Here you may select the word man. Read it with the children.
Ask individual children to point to it within the sentence, or find it in the book.
• Use the word man to generate other -an words. They may be others in the same
book (can) or ones children already know (ran) or that can be easily illustrated
(pan).
• Read the book again, asking children to point to any -an words.
• Make up wall charts with lists of these words, and encourage children to add to
them as they find or think of new words. These words may come from other
books, wall charts, or words already known to the children. These specific
words can be used to help children come to a generalization about the way in
which the sound common to all is written down. Gradually introduce more
complex words that illustrate the same sound-letter relationship (hand, land,
sand).

What is important here is that children learn about sound-letter relationships

inductively, within the context of something that is meaningful and whole, rather than
through abstract and unrelated phonics exercises. There may be times when a more
deductive approach is useful. Children who are already literate in their first language
may appreciate being given a generalization explicitly and finding other examples.
(This is the approach taken in many phonic-driven approaches to the teaching of
reading.) But this becomes a “telling” rather than a “reasoning” process.

TEACHING ABOUT SPELLING

The phrase “teaching about spelling” is used in place of “teaching spelling” deliberately
here, to emphasize again that—as with learning phonic knowledge—learning to spell
is largely a reasoning process and one based on the learner’s ability to develop gener¬
alizations. Once the child has discovered that written words are constant and can be
named, then, as discussed earlier, the sounds of the words can be related to the letters
that represent the words. But it is probably as children begin to find a way to represent
what they want to write themselves that they need to explore more systematically how
the phonemic system works.
It is important to recognize that the phonetic spellings of a young learner are often
indicative of positive understandings about the systems of orthography (spelling pat¬
terns) of English; train written as chrn, elephant written as elft, or shopping written as
shpg indicate that quite a lot has been learned about sound-letter relationships. The
unconventional spellings used by children in the earlier stages of writing are usually

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

quite systematic and related to the way they are articulating the words. Breaking up
words into their constituent sounds is not an easy matter, especially for an ESL learner.
One of the major ways that children learn to spell is to recognize and reproduce
common spelling patterns. Collecting and recording words that have a common pat¬
tern and that rhyme is one way of doing this (see Figure 7- 6 as examples). Encourage
children to add to these lists as they find new words with the same pattern.
When children do not know the spelling of a word, try to scaffold ho<w to spell:

• Encourage children to “have a go” at writing a word, to use their existing

knowledge about how sounds are written.
• Encourage them to articulate the word slowly, and as they say the word, to
think about each of the sounds they can hear.

tea 5eah creature, beacb team

sea neah feature, reach dreary
Plea beat teach gleam
pea r^eat peach shears
beam

FIGURE 7-6. Finding Common Patterns

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 Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning

• Draw analogies with other known words, and help them recognize a common
pattern.

Note that providing lists of thematically related words to be learned by rote (perhaps
related to a topic being studied) may assist in the learning of new vocabulary, but it
may not be helpful in teaching about spelling, since thematically related words are
unlikely to have a spelling pattern in common.

In Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at a number of reasons for supporting the integration
of ESL students into the mainstream class:

• Language is best learned through meaningful use in a variety of contexts, and

the curriculum is an ideal and ready-made resource for a focus on language for
learning.
• Concurrent teaching of language and content allows ESL students to continue
learning as they are developing their second language
• Language and curriculum learning support each other via the ongoing recycling
of concepts and knowledge and the language through which they are expressed.
• The “language-rich diet” of ESL teaching is of benefit to all students: it sup¬
ports all children to use language in ways that are new and critical to academic
learning.

In an integrated curriculum, children learn language, learn through language, and

learn about language. They leant language in the process of using it. They learn through
language when they use it to construct knowledge across all areas of the curriculum.
And they learn about language when there is a focus on “language as object.” In a well-
planned integrated program, all three of these aspects of language development have
the potential to be brought together.

A Final Word

The potential for learning is not finite or bounded. And the potential for learning in
school should not be restricted by a student’s lack of knowledge of the language of
instruction, because in this case—to return to the conclusion of Chapter 1—ESL
learners are denied their right to be full members of the school community. They
should not be expected to “prove themselves linguistically before they can claim their
full entitlement.” The responsibility for their second language development belongs to
the school and ultimately to their teachers.

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 Learning Language, Learning Through Language, and Learning About Language

No matter the educational constraints on both teachers and students sometimes

imposed by government policies or education systems, individual teachers can and do
make a difference to children’s lives. The notion of scaffolding that has been a recur-
rent theme throughout this book represents a way that individual teachers can main¬
tain high expectations of their students and reject the inequality that offers to some
students an alternative or watered-down curriculum, or one that, for reasons of lan¬
guage, they are unable to access. It assumes three principles. The first is to link with
and build on what children bring to school: their language, culture, understandings,
and experiences. The second is to provide the kind of support—responsive to the par¬
ticular language development needs of second language learners and to the language
demands of the mainstream curriculum—to enable them to learn successfully through
collaboration with their teachers and with other students. The third is the willingness
to “hand over” to students the responsibility to use what they have learned independ¬
ently, in new contexts and for their own purposes.
We know that some students begin their school life with less of what Delpit (1988)
refers to as “the accoutrements of the culture of power” than other students. Some
critical theorists refer to this as “cultural capital,” and part of that cultural capital is
the ability to control the spoken and written codes of the dominant society. As we
have discussed, it would be wrong to assume that children who are not fluent in these
codes will automatically acquire them through the process of being in school, without
specific kinds of support. In the words of Julianna, with which tnis book began, ESL
learners need to he able to use English not only for day-to-day purposes but “for school
work and strangers”—for academic learning and ultimately for negotiating their place
in the wider society. This book has suggested some ways in which individual teachers
can help ensure that this occurs.

Suggestions for Further Reading

CLEGG, J., ed. 1996. Mainstreaming ESL: Case Studies in Integrating ESL Students into the Main¬
stream Curriculum. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. (See especially Introduction.)

Cummins, J. 2000. “Transformative Pedagogy: Who Needs It.7" Chapter 10 in Language, Power
and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the Crossfire, ed. J. Cummins. Clevedon, UK: Multilin¬
gual Matters.

Davison, C., and A. Williams. 2001. “Integrating Language and Content: Unresolved
Issues.” Chapter 3 in English as a Second Language in the Mainstream: Teaching Learning and
Identity, ed. B. Mohan, C. Leung, and C. Davison. London: Longman.

Short, D. 1993. “Assessing Integrating Language and Content.” TESOL Quarterly 27 (4):
627-56.

139
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Note: Where activities are described fully in the chapters, only a brief description is given here.

After-Reading Activities

These activities include the following: story innovation; innovating on the ending;
cartoon strip; readers’ theatre; wanted posters; story map; time lines; hot seat; freeze
frames; cloze; monster cloze; vanishing cloze; text reconstruction; consonant groups;
phonic families; true/false questions; questioning the text. See Chapter 5.

Aural Cloze

This is a cloze exercise that focuses on listening skills. Each student has a text with
deletions. The full text is read aloud by the teacher and students must fill in the gaps.
See Chapter 6.

Barrier Games

Barrier games are discussed in detail in Chapter 2, along with other communicative
games. They are usually played in pairs, and involve solving a problem of some sort.
They involve an “information gap,” whereby each player has different information
that both need if they are to solve the problem. A feature of these games is that play¬
ers should not be able to see the other player’s information—hence the notion of a
“barrier” between them. See also Chapter 4.

Before-Reading Activities

These activities include the following: predicting from words; predicting from the title
or first sentence; predicting from a key illustration; picture sequencing; reader ques¬
tions; storytelling; storytelling in the mother tongue; sharing existing knowledge. See
Chapter 5.

Cloze

Cloze activities are pieces of text with some words deleted. They are a useful teaching
strategy for encouraging students to use prediction skills as they are reading, to help
you assess their general comprehension, and to gauge the difficulty of a text for a par¬
ticular student. They can be based on a text students have already read, or they can

141
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

be based on another familiar topic. Students should not be asked to do a cloze around
a topic they know nothing about. See Chapter 5.

Describe and Draw

This is a barrier game in which each child in a pair takes it in turns to describe some¬
thing he or she is drawing (or has drawn). His or her partner then has to draw the same
thing. See Chapter 2.

Dialogue Journal

As the name suggests, this is a conversation that is written down. It may be between
the student and teacher, or between an ESL student and an English-speaking buddy.
See Figure G-l.

What did you do yaterdbxy , hjario ?

T
y

I//hat did ^jou do at the. beach ?

H The he.dc/} 1 sum"].

Do MU Ufa

Y* I % ^ '
Afo you AT &xywirr)K|lOj '

Yes I eojOLj it veru much, hjcLrio I

Figure G—1. Dialogue Journal

142
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Dictogloss

This is a technique adapted from Ruth Wajnryb (1990). It is designed to develop lis¬
tening skills, but is particularly valuable because it integrates this with speaking, read¬
ing, and writing.

1. The teacher reads a short passage twice (or more) at normal speed. The pas¬
sage should be on a topic the students already know something about. (You
could write the passage yourself, or you could use a passage from one of the stu¬
dents’ textbooks in any curriculum area, or from a book related to a topic they
are studying.) The students just listen; they don’t write anything at this point.
2. The teacher reads the passage a third time at normal speed, and this time, while
the teacher is reading, the students write down as much as they can, as fast as
they can. They should not try to write sentences, just key words and phrases. It
is important that you make clear to the students that you do not expect them
to write everything down. The aim is just to get as much information as they
can. Handwriting and spelling are not important at this stage.
3. In pairs, the students compare and discuss the individual notes they have writ¬
ten. Together, they try to begin to reconstruct the original text they heard.
4. Two pairs of students then join to make a group of four. They repeat the same
process, again adding to and adapting their notes. By using these four sets of
notes, the group will probably be able to produce a fairly accurate record of the
original passage.
5. At this stage you can ask individual students to write out the passage based on
their notes. Alternatively, the group can do it together. (Groups could use large
sheets of paper and then put them on the wall for display.) Give them time to
check their writing, such as grammar and spelling. Then put the original passage
on an overhead and let the students compare what they have written with the
original. The aim is not to produce an identical text to the original, but to produce
a text that has the same information and is appropriately worded. Discuss with stu¬
dents the differences between the texts, pointing out (and praising) variations that
make sense and that show how the students were using their language knowledge.

Note: At Steps 3, 4, and 5, encourage students to reflect on what they are writing (e.g.,
to use what they know about English grammar to check for grammatical errors; to ask
the question “Does it make sense?”; and to use the context to guess words they were
unable to hear). See Chapter 6.

T During' Reading Activities

These activities include the following: modeled reading; skimming and scanning activ¬
ities; rereading for detail; shared book; word masking; pause and predict; shadow read¬
ing; summarizing the text; jigsaw reading; reading aloud. See Chapter 5.

143
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Expert and Home Groups

This is the organizational structure that underpins activities such as jigsaw listening or
jigsaw reading. Divide students into groups of six. (Numbers can be varied depending
on your class size.) Their task is to become “experts” in one aspect of a topic. Assign a
letter or name to each group. Within each group, number the students from one
through six. After they have become experts, through listening, viewing, reading, or
other kinds of research, the groups reform in their “home” groups, this time with all
the Is together, all the 2s and so on. They share the information they have acquired,
with each person contributing different information. In these kinds of activities, it’s
helpful to design information sheets for recording information. Students will fill in one
part of the information in their expert group, and the remainder of the information on
the basis of what they learn in their home group. See Chapters 2 and 4.

Find My Partner

Students should each have five or six pictures; two are the same but the others differ
in very small details. Mark one of the two identical pictures with a cross. Cards should
be face down on the table. Each child in a group of five (or however many cards there
are) takes one card. They must not show each other their pictures. The child who has
the picture marked with a cross must ask questions of the others in the group to find
out who has exactly the same picture. See Chapter 2.

Find the Difference

This is a barrier game in which pairs of students have two similar but not identical pic¬
tures; they must find the differences by questioning each other and/or describing the
picture. See Chapters 2 and 4-

Hands Up!

Students have a set of questions based on a text. The text is read aloud, and as stu¬
dents hear the information that answers a question, they raise their hands. Make sure
that the questions are in the order in which the information is given in the text. See
Chapter 6.

Hot Seat

This is a role-play activity that can involve the whole class. Children sit in a circle,
with one student, who takes on a character role, sitting in the “hot seat.” The remain¬
der of the class ask the character in the hot seat questions about his or her life. The
role can he based on a character in a book the class has read, or on a historical char¬
acter. See Chapters 2 and 5.

144
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

-'t'- If You Are ...

This is a listening activity that requires students to follow different instructions

depending on other information that relates to them. See Chapter 6.

T I’m Thinking of Something That . . .

Each child in a small group must choose an object to describe from a set of pictures
related to a topic being studied. Each student begins by saying “I’m thinking of some¬
thing that... and continues by describing the object. Other students must guess what
is being described. See Chapter 2.

T- Information Extraction Tasks

These are listening activities aimed at developing students’ skills in listening for key
information. See Chapter 6.

Information Grid

This is an information transfer activity whereby information in a text is represented in

another way. An information grid is illustrated in Figure G-2. The example is not yet
completed—students will add information as they research further. Note that it
encourages students to pick out main points from information, and it is very valuable
as an information resource for writing. It also dissuades students from simply copying
out large chunks from books when they do a project! See Chapter 4.

T- Inquiry and Elimination

This activity helps develop reasoning skills and practices question forms. See Chapter 2.

Interviews

This is a particularly valuable activity for ESL students, since it gives them an oppor¬
tunity to interact formally with an adult other than their teacher, and with someone
they don’t know. For many students, this means learning a more formal register of En¬
glish (see Chapter 1). Questions should be prepared beforehand, with discussion about
what it is appropriate to ask, the most important questions to ask, and the way these
questions should be asked. This is a good opportunity to discuss forms of address and
other “politeness” issues. See Chapter 4.

T Jigsaw Listening

In this activity, groups of students each listen to an audiotape. There is different infor¬
mation on each tape, which all students will eventually need. For example, in the
dinosaur topic described in Chapter 4, the students could answer the question, “Why

145
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Dinosaur When it What it What it Other features +

lived looked like ate interesting facts

ankylosaurus 70 mya Big and heavy only As big and heavy as a

Bony plates on its plants tank
head, neck, and a club
at the end of the tail

stegosaurus Plates on its back— Plates were to control

one or two rows but its temperature
we’re not sure Called the stupidest
Bony spikes on its tail dinosaur because its
brain was only the size
of a walnut!

tyrannosaurus 100 mya Very short arms. meat Very fierce

They couldn’t reach
its mouth

diplodocus Very long. Long neck The longest dinosaur, as

long as 7 cars or 16
people. Lived in N.
America

Figure G-2. Information Grid

did the dinosaurs disappear?” Four groups could each listen to one hypothesis: they
grew too large to move or breed, new flowering plants poisoned them, their diet caused
them to lay eggs that didn’t hatch, a meteorite hit the earth. Each group takes notes
about what they have learned. Then the groups regroup, with four students coming
together who each have information about one of the hypotheses. They share this and
now have a basis to answer the question. This is an example of the use of the
expert/home grouping described earlier. See Chapter 6.

Jumbled Sentences

Have the child dictate a sentence to you that relates to themselves or to a book that
has been read. Write the sentence onto a strip of card and then cut it into words. The
child must sort the words back into the correct order. As a simpler variant of this activ¬
ity, the child could also have a copy of the complete sentence on a strip of card on
which they match and place each of the individual words. See Chapter 5.

146
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Map Games

These are barrier games using incomplete maps that must be completed through ques¬
tioning, or games involving the giving of directions using the maps. See Chapter 6.

Matching Game (Listening)

This is a listening activity in which students must match a number of pictures to their
descriptions, which are read aloud. See Chapter 6.

Minimal Pair Exercises

These are designed to help children hear the difference between the phonemes of En¬
glish. See Chapter 6.

Monster Cloze

This is a variation of the traditional cloze and is a whole-class activity. Only the title of
the passage is written on the board. The passage itself, however, consists of only the
gaps. Students guess the missing words (in any order), and the teacher writes in any
correct words in the appropriate gap. The task becomes progressively easier because
once the sentences are partially completed, students should be able to predict the
remaining words by using their knowledge of the topic and of English grammar. See
Chapter 5.

Paired Problem Solving

Two problems are involved, with pairs of students solving one of the problems. Pairs
solving different problems come together and question each other about how each pair
solved its problem, prior to attempting later to solve the same problem themselves. See
Chapter 2.

Picture and Sentence Matching

Jumble up a set of pictures and corresponding sentences. Children must match each
picture to the appropriate sentence. This could be based on a book that is being read
in class. See Chapter 5.

Picture Dictation

This is a listening activity in which students have a number of individual pictures cor¬
responding to a story. The story is read aloud, and as they listen, students must put the
pictures into the right sequence. See Chapter 6.

147
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Picture Sequencing

Use a set of pictures that tell a simple story, or that illustrate a sequence, such as the
life cycle of an insect. Individually, in pairs, or in groups, students put the pictures in
an appropriate order and write the story or describe the sequence. A more challenging
use of a picture sequence, and one that focuses more on spoken language, involves giv¬
ing each student in a group one card (there should be the same number of students as
there are picture cards). Tell the students not to show the others in their group their
card. Each student describes his or her card (it doesn’t matter who starts), and when
they have all finished describing their cards, the group decides on the basis of the
descriptions which card should come first, which second, and so on. On the basis of
the order decided, each student puts his or her card down. For younger students and
those very new to English, make sure that cards are placed from left to right. See
Chapter 2.

Problem-Solving Activities

Groups of children solve a problem through discussion, and then report back to the
class about their solutions.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires are a useful way to collect opinions on a topic, such as the “Local
Issue” discussed in Chapter 7. Constructing the questions also involves a focus on both
form and appropriate register. See Chapter 2.

Running Dictation

This is a team game that can be a very noisy activity! Students should be in teams of
about six. Before you begin, write a short text on a large sheet ot paper, starting each
sentence on a new line. Place the text on a wall somewhere outside the classroom (e.g.,
in a corridor outside the room). The first member of each team runs out of the class to
the text and reads (and tries to remember) the first sentence. He or she runs back into
the class and dictates it to his or her team, who write it down. When everyone in the
team has finished writing, the second member of the team runs out, reads and memo¬
rizes the second sentence, returns, and dictates it. This continues until a team has
completed the text. If a member forgets the sentence on the way back (this happens
often!), he or she can go back and read it again, but of course time is lost if they do
this. Point out to students that they should try to think about the meaning of their sen¬
tence—simply trying to memorize a sentence as a string of words is much harder than
remembering something meaningful. However, make sure that you use a text that is
within your students’ capabilities to understand. See Chapter 4.

148
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Say It Again

This is a listening activity in which students “shadow” a character in a video. It pro¬

vides practice in pronunciation, stress, and intonation. See Chapter 6.

Semantic Web

A semantic web, sometimes called a Semantic Map, is a way of collecting and organ¬
izing information. Often this is carried out initially as a brainstorm, with students
recalling what they already know about a subject and the words and concepts they
associate with the key word (see Figure G-3). As the figure demonstrates, often these
ideas will reflect very different categories and levels of generalization, so after the
initial brainstorm, these random associations can be reorganized and classified by the
teacher and students together. (For this reason, it helps to use small pieces of paper to
write up the suggestions, fixed with reusable adhesive putty, which can be repositioned
later.) The semantic map in Figure G-3 was later reorganized into four types of infor¬
mation: the names of some dinosaurs, some facts about them, why they became
extinct, and how they have been used in fiction. As the topic progressed, new cate¬
gories, subcategories, and information were added. See Chapter 4.

tyrannosaurus
/1 veda long fmt ago

big and fierct became evhinch

C(J(Lather chanaed ?
Jurassic Pa/K md-eor hit eirth?)

had spikes an their ha ckfS

diplod ocu£
y -fierce
some
had smal
Drains
Some loere like
I'wieA he. hare people birds, could fig
many different finds
Some a he
only plants
SteyoSaaruS

FIGURE G-3. Initial Semantic Web

149
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Shadow Reading

Children either follow or “read along” with an audiotaped excerpt from a book. The
teacher can create this. It children read aloud, they should try to follow the pronunci¬
ation, stress patterns, and intonation patterns as closely as possible. This is a useful
“rehearsal” if children are going to read aloud to the rest of the class (e.g., in Readers
Theatre). See Chapters 5 and 6.

Sound Bingo

This is based on a traditional Bingo game. Children hear sounds rather than words. For
example, they may hear a baby crying or a dog barking. As they hear the relevant word,
they cover the appropriate word on the Bingo board, tor example, baby or dog. See
Chapter 6.

Sound Stories

This is a listening activity in which children must find a connection between several
sounds. See Chapter 6.

Split Dictatioii

This is a listening activity in which pairs of students each have part ot a text. By dic¬
tating the parts they have to their partner, each student must complete the text by till¬
ing in what is missing. See Chapter 6.

Spot the Difference

This listening activity is aimed at developing students’ skills in listening for general
information. See Chapter 6.

Story Map

A story map is a visual representation ot the characters and events of a story. Children
can construct this in groups or individually, either adding to it as they read the story,
or developing it as an after-reading activity. It is often helpful to use a story map to help
prompt students if they are retelling a story. Alternatively, they could draw their own
story map prior to writing a story. See Chapter 5.

Teacher-Guided Reporting

As a child retells about something he or she has learned or found out, the teacher pro¬
vides scaffolding to support the child’s retelling. To do so, the teacher uses prompting,
asking for clarification, recasting, or questioning. See Chapters 2 and 3.

150
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Text Reconstruction

Students reconstruct a text that has been cut up into sentences or paragraphs. They
should be able to explain the sequence they have chosen. This is a good activity for
focusing on the cohesive links across sentences, such as pronoun reference and con-
junctions. See Chapters 4 and 5.

Vanishing Cloze

This is another cloze variation. Write up on the board a short passage (three or four
sentences, or even shorter for beginners) based on something students are familiar
with. Students read it aloud together. Erase one word from anywhere in the text. Stu¬
dents read it again, putting hack the missing word. Erase another word and repeat the
process. Continue until all the words are removed, so that students are now “reading”
from memory. These repeated readings are especially helpful if the text contains a
tricky grammatical structure or subject-specific vocabulary that the students are cur¬
rently learning, since it provides a context for repetition that is both fun and chal¬
lenging. See Chapter 5.

Wallpapering

This is a brainstorm activity. Give groups of students small sheets of paper to write
down one thing they know about a topic, or one idea they have about a controversial
topic. Stick the pieces of paper on the walls of the classroom. Students walk round and
read other students’ ideas. Later they can comment on the ideas of others: I agree with
the one that said ... 1 didn’t know that... I don’t think that’s right. See Chapter 4.

What Can You Hear?

This is a listening activity designed to introduce students to focused listening. See

Chapter 6.

What Did You See?

This is a memory game that practices vocabulary. Learners must try to remember a
selection of objects or pictures, which they look at for a short time, and which are then
covered. See Chapter 2.

Word Linking

This is an activity designed to improve pronunciation and listening skills. See Chapter 6.

Word Wall/Word Bank

This is a display of words that are relevant to a particular topic or text type (see Fig¬
ure G-4). See Chapter 4.

151
 Glossary of Teaching Activities

Connectives for discussion writing

First
Second
Also
In addition
On the other hand
Fiowever
Nevertheless
Therefore

Connectives for narratives “Savins” verbs for narratives

One day said
After explained
Afterwards shouted
Later on growled
The following morning cried
In the end yelled
Finally whispered
At last replied

Figure G-4. Word Wall/Word Bank

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SlON, C., ed. 1991. More Recipes for Tired Teachers; Well-Seasoned Activities for the ESOL Class¬
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158
 Index

A Cloze activities, 65, 93-94, 126, 128,

After-Reading activities, 91-97 141-42
Allen, Virginia G., 77 Monster Cloze, 94, 147
Assessment Oral/Aural, 112, 141
children’s language, finding out about, Vanishing Cloze, 94, 151
123, 125-28 Code breakers, readers as, 81
speaking, as assessment task for, 125-26, Cognitive development, 8-10
127 Collaboration, learning through, 7-10, 15-16
of a unit, 131-32 Complication, in narratives, 55-56
writing, 70-76 Consonant Groups activity, 95
Aural/Oral Cloze, 112, 141 Context
Australia, increase in ESL students, 5-6 of culture, 2
Australian context, 59 integrating language and context, 5-6
language and, 2-3
B of situation, 2-3
Banking model of teaching, 6 Context-embedded registers, 4-5
Barrier games, 23, 24, 63-64, 70, 141 Context-reduced registers, 4-5
Before-Reading activities, 85-87, 141 Contextualized language, 17
Beginners Critical method, 80-81
early reading instruction, 83-84 Culture
group work for, 32-34 context of, 2
scaffolding approach to writing, 68-69 genres and, 54
Books, choosing, 97-100 role of cultural knowledge in reading, 81
Building the field, in curriculum cycle, 60, Cummins, Jim, 4, 5
61-64 Curriculum cycle
in genre approach, 60-67
C in scaffolding approach to writing, 68
Canada, increase in ESL students, 5-6 stages, 60-67
Cartoon Strip activity, 92 Curriculum integration, 25
“Changing Face of Literacy, The,” 51 Curriculum learning
Christie, Frances, 51, 54 children’s language, finding out about,
Classroom talk, 14-38 123, 125-28
and ESL learners, 16-17 integrating ESL teaching into regular
group work and (see Group work) classroom, 118-32
talking with children, 34-38 integrating language and subject
Clegg, John, 118 learning, 121-28

159
 Index

Curriculum learning, continued Expert/home grouping strategy, 61-62, 144

integration, value of, 119-21 Explicit teaching
language and curriculum learning, plan- about writing, 57-61
ning unit for, 128-32 defined, 60
language in the curriculum, finding the, Exploratory talk, 14
121-23, 124
planning framework, 129-32 F
Field, as contextual factor, 2, 4
D Finding the language in the curriculum,
Delpit, Lisa, 59-60 121-23, 124
Derewianka, Beverley, 54 Find My Partner game, 33, 144
Describe and Draw activity, 32-33, 142 Find the Difference game, 23-24, 42, 144
Des-Fountain, Jenny, 31 Focus language, 130, 131
Dewey, John, 6 Freeze Frames activity, 93
Dialogue journals, 70, 142
Dictogloss, 65, 110, 143 G
Display questions, 16-17 Genre approach to teaching writing, 53-67
Driver, Rosalind, 45 building the field, 60, 61-64
During-Reading activities, 87-91, 143 culture and, 54
curriculum cycle, 60-67
E explicit teaching about writing, 57-61
Elimination activities, 32 independent writing, 61, 67
Empty vessel model of teaching, 6 joint construction, 61, 66-67
English as Second Language learners linguistic features, 53
classroom talk and, 16-17 modelling the text type, 61, 64-66
collaboration, value of, 8-10 purpose, 53
group work and, 17-20 structure, 53
integration, value of, 119-21 text types, 54-57, 58
language and context, 2-3, 5-6 Goodman, Kenneth S., 78
language learning with curriculum, inte¬ Grammar, context teaching and, 65
grating, 25 Graphophonic knowledge, 78
mainstream classrooms, ESL students in, Group work
1-6 activities (see Group work activities)
making meaning explicit, 3-4 cognitive appropriateness of, 25
new registers, learning, 4-5 curriculum topics, integrating group
predictors of academic success, 11 work with broader, 25
reading instruction and, 82-84 effective, 20-29
scaffolding and, 10-11 instructions, providing clear and explicit,
social view of teaching and learning, 21-22
6-11 involvement of all children, ensuring,
English language. See also Language 25-26
phonemes, 113 organizing class, 24
sounds of English, 113 outcomes, having clear, 24-25
stress system, 113 paired problem solving, 31-32
Events, in narratives, 55-56 and second language learners, 17-20
Expert groups, 24 success in, as learned skill, 26-29

160
 Index

talk as necessary component, 22-24 IRF (Initiation, Response, Feedback), 16-17

time to complete tasks, having enough,
26
J
Group work activities Jigsaw Listening activity, 62, 109, 145-46
beginners, activities for, 32-34 Jigsaw Reading activity, 90
Describe and Draw activities, 32-33 Joint construction, 61, 66-67
group and pair activities, suggestions for, Jumbled Sentences activity, 70, 95, 146
29-32
Hot Seat, 30 K
I’m Thinking Of activities, 32 Knowledge, kinds of, 78-80
Inquiry and Elimination activities, 32
picture sequencing, 29-30 L
problem solving, 30-32 Language
questionnaires, 30 and context, 2-3
What Did You See? activities, 34 context, integrating language and, 5-6
Guided Construction of Knowledge, The, 14 focus on, 128
making meaning explicit, 3-4
H new registers, learning, 4-5
Halliday, Michael, 2, 118 Language learning
Hammond, Jenny, 54 children’s language, finding out about,
Hands Up! activity, 111, 144 123, 125-28
Home groups, 24 curriculum as context for, 118-32
Hot Seat activity, 30, 92-93, 144 integrating language and subject learn¬
Howe, Alan, 31 ing, 121-28
integration, value of, 119-21
I language and curriculum learning, plan¬
If You Are ... activity, 108, 145 ning unit for, 128-32
I’m Thinking Of activities, 32, 145 language in the curriculum, finding the,
Independent writing, in curriculum cycle, 121-23, 124
61, 67 phonemic awareness, teaching, 135-36
Information-based topics, listening and, phonics in, 132-35
104-106 planning, framework for, 129-32
Information Extraction activity, 111-12, reading, assessment task for, 126, 128
145 speaking, assessment task for, 125-26,
Information gaps, 23-24 127
Information grids, 64, 145 spelling, in integrated unit, 132-38
Inner speech, 8 spelling, teaching about, 136-38
Innovating on the Ending activity, 91 Learning
Inquiry and Elimination activities, 32, 145 principles of instruction, 132-34
Instruction, principles of, 132-34 progressive model of learning, 6-7
Instructions, providing clear and explicit, scaffolding in, 10-11
21-22 social view of, 6-11
Interaction, learning through, 7-10, 15-16 through collaboration, 7-10, 15-16
Interpersonal topics, listening and, 105-106 transmission model of learning, 6-7
Interviews, 62, 109, 145 views of, 6-7
In-the-head knowledge, 78-80 Listener as tape recorder, 103

161
 Index

Listening, 102-16 Mainstreaming ESL: Case Studies in Integrat¬

activities (see Listening activities) ing ESL Students into the Mainstream Cur¬
effective, 103 riculum, 118
how to listen, introducing, 106-107 Map Games, 108-109, 147
making sense of what is heard, 102-12 Martin, Jim, 54
process, 103-104 Matching Game (listening), 112, 147
sounds of English, 113 Meaning
teaching, 106-12 focus on, 128
theory, 102-106 imparting, which is not already known, 3
types, 104-106 making meaning explicit, 3-4
Listening activities, 106-12 responding to, 38
Describe and Draw, 108 Mercer, Neil, 14
Dictogloss, 110 Message redundancy, 17-18
general information, listening for, 112 Minimal Pair exercises, 114, 147
Hands Up, 111 Minority students
how to listen, introducing, 106-107 key areas schools should address, 11
If You Are ..., 108 and progressive approaches to instruc¬
information extraction, 111-12 tion, 57, 59-60
Interviews, 109 Mode, as contextual factor, 2, 4
Jigsaw Listening, 109 Mode continuum
Map Games, 108-109 defined, 41
Matching Game, 112 doing an experiment, 42-44
Minimal Pair exercises, 114 introducing key vocabulary, 43, 44-45
one-way listening, 110-12 journal writing, 43, 48-49
Oral/Aural Cloze, 112 moving from talking to writing using
Picture Dictation, 112 mode continuum, 40-49
Say It Again, 115 teacher-guided reporting, 43, 45—48
Shadow Reading, 116 Modelled Reading activity, 87
Sound Bingo, 107 Modelling the text type, in curriculum
Sound Stories, 107 cycle, 60, 61-64
specific information, listening for, 111-12 Monster Cloze activity, 65, 94, 147
Split Decision, 110
Spot the Difference, 112 N
two-way listening, 107-10 Narratives, linguistic features common to,
What Can You Hear?, 106-107 55-57
Word Linking, 114-15 National Center for Education Statistics, 6
Listening in Action, 102 Nominalization, 41
Literacy Nunan, David, 103, 104-105
books, choosing, 97-100
expectations, changing, 51-52 O
pedagogy, theories of literacy, 80-82 One-way listening, 104-106, 110-12
success, components of, 81-82 Open questions, 36-38
Oral/Aural Cloze, 112, 141
M Organizational structure, in narratives, 55
Mainstream classrooms, ESL students in, Orientation, in narratives, 55
1-6

162
 Index

P Reading, 77-100
Paired problem solving, as assessment task activities (see Reading activities)
for speaking, 125-26, 127, 147 books, choosing, 97-100
Pause and Predict activity, 89 code breaker, reader as, 81
Phonemes, 113 early reading instruction, 83-84
Phonics ESL learners and, 82-84
in integrated unit, 132-35 pedagogy, theories of literacy, 80-82
method, 80-81 success, components of, 81-82
phonemic awareness, teaching, 135-36 text analyst, reader as, 82
Phonic Families activity, 95 text participant, reader as, 81
Piaget, Jean, 6 text user, reader as, 82
Picture and Sentence Matching game, 62, theory, 77-80
147 Reading activities, 84-97
Picture Dictation activity, 112, 147 After-Reading activities, 91-97
Picture Matching activity, 95 Before-Reading activities, 85-87
Picture Sequencing activity, 29-30, 70, 148 Cartoon Strip, 92
Planning, framework for, 129-32 Cloze, 93-94
Predicting from a Key Illustration activity, Consonant Groups, 95
86 During-Reading activities, 87-91, 143
Predicting from Title or First Sentence Freeze Frames, 93
activity, 85 functions, 84-85
Predicting from Words activity, 85 Hot Seat, 92-93
Principles of instruction, 132-34 Innovating on the Ending, 91
Problem-solving activities, 31-32, 148 Jigsaw Reading, 90
Process approaches to instruction, 57 Jumbled Sentences, 95
Progressive Modelled Reading, 87
approaches to instruction, 57, 59-60 Monster Cloze, 94
model of learning, 6-7 Pause and Predict, 89
Purpose, in narratives, 55 Phonic Families, 95
Picture and Sentence Matching, 95
Q planning, 84-85
Question framework for assessing writing, Predicting from a Key Illustration, 86
72-74 Predicting from Title or First Sentence,
Questioning, group work and, 31 85
Questioning the Text activity, 96-97 Predicting from Words, 85
Questionnaires, 30, 148 Questioning the Text, 96-97
Quiet group-work voices, 28-29 Reader Questions, 86
Readers’ Theatre, 92
R Reading Aloud, 91
Reader Rereading for Detail, 88-89
as code breaker, 81 Sequencing Illustrations, 86
as text analyst, 82 Shadow Reading, 89-90
as text participant, 81 Shared Book, 89
as text user, 82 Sharing Existing Knowledge, 86-87
Reader Questions activity, 86 Skimming and Scanning the Text, 87-88
Readers’ Theatre, 92 Story Innovation, 91

163
 Index

Reading activities, continued Situation, context of, 2-3

Story Map, 92 Skimming and Scanning the Text activity,
Storytelling, 86 87-88
Storytelling in Mother Tongue, 86 Slowing down the discourse, 37-38
Summarizing the Text, 90 Social view of teaching and learning, 6—11
Text Reconstruction, 95 Socio-cultural perspective on learning, 8-10
Time Lines, 92 Socio-historical perspective on learning,
True/False Questions, 95-96 8-10
Vanishing Cloze, 94 Sound Bingo activity, 107, 150
Wanted Posters, 92 Sound Stories activity, 107, 150
Word Masking, 89 Speaking. See Listening; Talk
Reading Aloud activity, 91 Speaking to writing, transition from. See
Registers Talking to writing, transition from
learning new, 4-5 Spelling
of text, 2-3 in integrated unit, 132-38
Reporting, group work and, 31 teaching about, 136-38
Rereading for Detail activity, 88-89 Split Dictation activity, 110, 150
Resolution, in narratives, 55, 56 Spot the Difference activity, 112, 150
Rhyming, 134-35 Story Innovation activity, 91
Rigg, Pat, 77 Story Map activity, 70, 92, 150
Rost, Michael, 102, 115-16 Storytelling activity, 86
Rothery, Joan, 54 Storytelling in Mother Tongue activity, 86
Running Dictation, 65, 148 Stress system, English language, 113
Structure, in narratives, 55
S Suggestions, group work and making, 32
Say It Again activity, 115, 149 Summarizing the Text activity, 90
Scaffolding, 10-11 Syntactic knowledge, 78
collective, 19-20
defined, 10 T
Scaffolding approach to writing, 67-70 Talk
for students new to English, 69-70 classroom talk (See Classroom talk)
using curriculum cycle, 68 listening (see Listening)
for young writers, 68-69 as necessary component of group work,
Scanning the Text activity, 87-88 22-24
Schema knowledge, 78-80 role of, in learning, 14-16
“School Effectiveness for Language Minor¬ speaking to writing, transition from (see
ity Students,” 11 Talking to writing, transition from)
Second Language Learners (SLL). See Eng¬ talking with children, 34-38
lish as Second Language learners Talking to writing, transition from
Semantic knowledge, 78 doing an experiment, 42-44
Semantic web, 62, 149 introducing key vocabulary, 43-44, 45
Sentence Matching activity, 95 journal writing, 43, 48-49
Sequencing Illustrations activity, 86 teacher-guided reporting, 43, 45-48
Shadow Reading activity, 89-90, 116, 150 using mode continuum, 40-49
Shared Book activity, 89 Teacher-guided reporting, 34-38, 43,
Sharing Existing Knowledge activity, 86-87 45-48, 150

164
 Index

Teaching
principles of instruction, 132-34 W
social view of, 6-11 Wajnryb, Ruth, 143
Tenor, as contextual factor, 2, 4 Wallpapering, 62, 151
Text analyst, reader as, 82 Wanted Posters activity, 92
Text participant, reader as, 81 What Can You Hear? activity, 106-107,
Text Reconstruction activity, 65, 95, 151 151
Text types What Did You See? activity, 34, 151
in genre approach to teaching writing, “When Does Teacher Talk Work as Input?,”
54-57, 58 40
modelling the text type in curriculum When They Don’t All Speak English: Integrat¬
cycle, 60, 61-64 ing the ESL Student in the Regular Class¬
Text user, reader as, 82 room, 77
Texts, making meaning explicit, 3-4 Whole language method, 80-81
Thinking aloud, 14 Whole-word method, 80-81
“Three Aspects of Children’s Language Wong-Fillmore, Lily, 40
Development: Learning Language, Word Bank activity, 62, 69, 151
Learning Through Language and Learn¬ Word Linking activity, 114-15, 151
ing About Language,” 118 Word Masking activity, 89
Time Lines activity, 92 Word Wall activity, 62, 151
Transmission model of learning, 6-7 Writing, 51-76
True/False Questions activity, 95-96 assessment, 70-76
Two-way listening, 104-106, 107-10 expectations, changing, 51-52
genre approach (see Genre approach to
U teaching writing)
United Kingdom, increase in ESL students, scaffolding approach to (see Scaffolding
5-6 approach to writing)
United States, increase in ESL students, second language, learning to write in a,
5-6 52
Use, focus on, 129 Speaking to writing, transition from (see
Talking to writing, transition from)
V
Vanishing Cloze activity, 65, 94, 151 Z
Vygotsky, Lev, 7-8, 10 Zone of proximal development, 8, 10

165
 hSRYGROUE COLLEGE

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SCOFFOLDIFIG
LanGuaGe
SCOFFOLDIGG
LeaRnmG H ow does a mainstream elementary classroom teacher
leaching Second Language Learners with little or no specialized ESL training meet the
challenge of teaching linguistically diverse students?
in the Mainstream Classroom Pauline Gibbons suggests how: integrate the teaching of
English with the content areas of the regular curriculum.
What’s more, she shows how in this practical resource book.
Pauline GiBBons
Gibbons begins with a strong theoretical underpinning for her
Foreword by Jim Cummins practice, drawing on a functional model of language,
sociocultural theories of learning, and current research on
second-language development. After supporting her view that the regular curriculum offers
the best language-learning environment for young ESL students, Gibbons demonstrates the
ways in which content areas provide a context for the teaching of English skills, from
speaking and listening to reading and writing. These skills can be integrated in the learning
of diverse subjects as Gibbons illustrates with a wide range of teaching and learning
activities across the curriculum, supplemented with programming and assessment formats
and checklists.

Language learning is not a simple linear process. It involves the ongoing development of
skills for a range of purposes. Gibbons sees this development as largely the result of the
social contexts and interactions in which learning occurs. By focusing on the ways in which
teachers can "scaffold” language and learning in the content areas, she takes a holistic
approach—one that appreciates the struggle of students learning a new language, while
simultaneously developing subject knowledge in it, and acknowledges the challenge for
teachers to address these needs.

Given today’s culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, ESL students can no longer
be thought of as a group apart from the mainstream—they are the mainstream. This book
describes the ways to ensure ESL learners become full members of the school community
with the language and content skills they need for success.

Pauline Gibbons teaches postgraduate courses in TESOL at the University of Technology,

Sydney, Australia. A teacher and teacher educator for many years, she has worked in Hong
Kong, Laos, Thailand, the Marshall Islands, and South Africa among other locations. Her
special interest is in elementary-level ESL pedagogy and the integration of language and
content teaching. She is the author of another Heinemann title, Learning to Learn in a
Second Language (1993).

ISBN 0-325-00366-1
9 0 0 0 0>

Heinemann
www.heinemann.com
9 780325 003665