In recent years teachers at all levels of instruction have become more and more interested in how they can support their students in learning and using forms of written language. One useful metaphor for this support is scaffolding.
Just as builders put scaffolding around a building while it is being built, so scaffolding can be used to support a person's learning of written language. By studying examples of texts, discussing appropriate or useful language, doing practice exercises and using structured outlines, all in collaboration with the teacher and peers, students can build bridges between reading and writing which they could not normally build on their own. In theory, students who are 'scaffolded' in this way move from being dependent on the teacher's words to being independent and able to use their own words.
According to Harris and Hodges in their The Literacy Dictionary (1996), scaffolding is:
In learning, the gradual withdrawal of adult (eg teacher) support, as through instruction, modelling, questioning, feedback etc., for a child's performance across successive engagements, thus transferring more autonomy to the child.
The concept of scaffolding owes much to the work of the Russian social psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his many followers who have researched the social basis of human learning and development through interaction. Vygotsky, in a book called Thought and Language written in the 1920s, coined the term 'Zone of Proximal Development':
The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by individual problem-solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. The ZPD defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state. These functions could be termed the 'buds' or 'flowers' of development rather than the 'fruits' of development.
One of Vygotsky's followers in the west, Jerome Bruner, was one of the first to use the term 'scaffold' in connection with learning.
The child's mind does not move to higher levels of abstraction like the tide coming in.....As a teacher, you do not wait for readiness to happen; you foster or 'scaffold' it by deepening the child's powers at the stage where you find him or her now
Some Practical Examples
Examples of exercises which work on this principle of guided learning through practice are:
* Grammatical scaffolding: exercises designed to target particular grammatical structures
* Outlining and writing frames: exercises providing 'skeleton' outlines, perhaps with sentence prompts, key vocabulary or pre-arranged paragraphs, to give writers a structure to write in
* Cloze procedures: exercises in which texts with missing elements - words, phrases, sentences - have to be completed by the student
* Re-writing: exercises which provide language elements of a text but which require rewriting in some way, perhaps re-arranging in an appropriate order or changing the tone
* Genre scaffolding: using models or samples to discover and then imitate langufeaturesures which are commonly used in a particular genre, such as description or explanation
* Rhetorical Models: using models to compare how texts perform rhetorical moves such as making an argument, giving examples or presenting personal opinions - always followed by practice exercises involving imitation or 'improving' a bad or incomplete example
* Joint Construction: an exercise where a group of learners construct a text together, for example on an overhead projector or a flipchart, with the teacher as the 'scribe' and 'mentor', suggesting possible words and phrases but also writing down what the learners say to build up a text (this approach can also be used effectively for revising a first draft)
* Peer Response Feedback: an exercise where learners work in pairs or small groups, perhaps using prompts provided by the teacher, to respond to each other's writing
* Teacher Feedback: can be used not just to grade and evaluate, but also to scaffold future writing
Metalanguage
One of the aims of scaffolding is to create practical but guided situations where learners can reflect on what they are doing when they make a text. This reflection builds a fund of metalanguage - language about language - as texts are talked through with the teacher and fellow learners. W
riters can then transfer this metalanguage, in ever more abbreviated and adapted forms, to future writing situations.
As Grabe and Kaplan suggest, this gives a prominent role to the teacher of writing beyond the transmission of practical skills:
Teachers should provide students with basic metalinguistic vocabulary and routines so that they can talk about writing. Even at early stages students can talk about difficulties in finding the right words, about a problem with organisation, about a less-than-clear example etc. Students cannot be expected to do this without learning how to do so from a teacher. The teacher needs to present many models and guided examples of how to look at writing, assess the strong and weak points, look for better alternatives, and recognize the language structures and vocabulary that go with specific genres and tasks. These insights and routines should be incorporated gradually into ongoing student interactions while they are writing, and thus become part of their active writing over time.
About Me
- Rob Oliver
- I am a learning and development consultant specialising in professional training and career transition in the international non-profit sector, including the United Nations system. I am from London in the UK and currently based in The Netherlands.