Scaffolding Practice: Supporting Emerging Bilinguals’ Academic Language Use in Two Classroom Communities

Abstract

For teachers learning to support emerging bilingual students in literacy classrooms, attending to academic language can encourage students’ disciplinary meaning-making as they learn this new language. Taking a community-focused, language-as-practice perspective, this study examines how two teachers scaffold first-grade emerging bilingual students’ academic language use as they explore cause and effect relationships in Ezra Jack Keats’ text, The Snowy Day. Findings show that scaffolds included modeling, recasting, and highlighting academic language use during disciplinary meaning-making, as well as the use of multiple modalities and responsive scaffolding when exploring academic language. Findings also suggest that a strict attention to prescribed uses of academic language at times constrained students’ participation in classroom meaning-making. Implications from this study include the need for integrating content and language learning, the need for responsive and flexible scaffolds, and the importance of community scaffolding.