Strategies and Methods of Scaffolding Text-based sources for Weak(er) ESL-Learners of English

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Bilingualer Sachfachunterricht als content and language integrated learning (CLIL), language: English, abstract: In this paper, I wish to explore and apply a selected range of the possible

strategies and methods of scaffolding text¿based sources for weaker learners, or

learners simply not as privileged by their social background. If one looks at the present

educational landscape of Berlin one will come across a selection of bilingual schools:

Ones where native speakers teach nearly the entire curriculum in English, and a large

range of schools offering bilingual classes or modules. The majority of schools still do

not offer any bilingual education opportunities.2 Therefore, the benefits of bilingual

education (German¿English) seem to be only for privileged students (cf. Zydatiß 2007),

though there are a few exceptions throughout Germany. (Cf. Rabe 2013) The overall

amount material available for bilingual education and the teachers being educated for it

are still a small portion in comparison to the overall amount of material and teachers

available in both English and History (monolingual German) in primary and secondary

school curriculum. The actual material being published often still lacks the degree of

text¿based scaffolding described in theory by Pilzecker (1997a) and Wildhage (2003).

Interestingly, many ordinary textbooks of English now offer very brief bilingual

modules.

The first part of this paper briefly explores some of the linguistic background of

scaffolding text¿based material in bilingual teaching of history in German Sekundarstufe

1. In the second part of this paper, I will apply my findings to a short bilingual module

offered in a contemporary textbook English G21 D4 [year 8] Erweiterte Ausgabe by the

German textbook publishing company Cornelsen. Looking at a bilingual module in this

exemplary textbook G21 one wonders how much language¿related scaffolding was

included by the editors due to the real didactical needs of the learners and might have

been left out in the process of laying out the textbook and the limitations of space in a

due to content?