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

Research Paper from the year 2013 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, 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 textbased 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 (GermanEnglish) seem to be only for privileged students (cf. Zydati 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
textbased 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 textbased 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 mo