A Scaffolding Strategy to Help Experienced ELLs Express Complex Ideas
This technique gives multilingual students explicit instruction on how to effectively develop their ideas for each part of a paragraph and to link one idea to the next.
By Tan Huynh, Beth Skelton
Huynh and Skelton present strategies for helping advanced English learners write argumentative essays that require them to make a claim and support it with the evidence. Although scaffolds such as “CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) and RACE (Restate the question, Answer the question, Cite the evidence, Explain the evidence)” can help, they are usually inadequate in enabling students to start writing.
Rather than providing complete sentence starters, the authors give the students specific words to use and then explain and demonstrate how to use them. They call these embedded scaffolds for CER.
Claim: Huynh and Skelton begin with what they call sentence mirroring in which students take the question and make it into a claim that is similar to a thesis statement or topic sentence. The teacher demonstrates how this is done using topics that are not among the assignments.
Evidence: This is followed by modeling the use of phrases such as according to, an example of, or for instance to introduce the evidence that students have found. This includes citing the source and a short list of the types of evidence that might be relevant, for example, dates, names, or statistics. Again, the teacher provides models for the students to imitate.
Reasoning: The last step, reasoning, helps students explain how the evidence supports the claim. Students might start their sentence with the words since or because. Since this step is the most difficult for multilinguals, sometimes the authors tell a joke, and those students who get it explain it to the ones who do not. This helps students understand the importance of explaining the reasoning behind the evidence.
Using this method, the advanced MLs in the authors’ classes have been successful in demonstrating their capability in responding to prompts that require high level thinking.
When MLs are unfamiliar with academic language, they use casual vocabulary to express themselves even though the academic setting requires higher language skills. Because of this, and because some content teachers have not been taught how to teach language, Huynh and Skelton recommend a method that can help teachers accomplish this in their discipline.
