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: 20 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 possiblestrategies and methods of scaffolding text‐based sources for weaker learners orlearners simply not as privileged by their social background. If one looks at the presenteducational 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 largerange of schools offering bilingual classes or modules. The majority of schools still donot offer any bilingual education opportunities.2 Therefore the benefits of bilingualeducation (German‐English) seem to be only for privileged students (cf. Zydatiß 2007)though there are a few exceptions throughout Germany. (Cf. Rabe 2013) The overallamount material available for bilingual education and the teachers being educated for itare still a small portion in comparison to the overall amount of material and teachersavailable in both English and History (monolingual German) in primary and secondaryschool curriculum. The actual material being published often still lacks the degree oftext‐based scaffolding described in theory by Pilzecker (1997a) and Wildhage (2003).Interestingly many ordinary textbooks of English now offer very brief bilingualmodules.The first part of this paper briefly explores some of the linguistic background ofscaffolding text‐based material in bilingual teaching of history in German Sekundarstufe1. In the second part of this paper I will apply my findings to a short bilingual moduleoffered in a contemporary textbook English G21 D4 [year 8] Erweiterte Ausgabe by theGerman textbook publishing company Cornel