Teachers’ professional knowledge in scaffolding academic literacies for English language learners

‘Broadbanded’ concerns about mainstream literacy standards ignore English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ need for language support and development; for example, schools expect learners to write about narratives but provide little systematic attention to the language needed. This article presents the collaborative efforts of an ESL professional and a mainstream classroom teacher, drawing attention to their sophisticated design of a unit of work, a novel study, that scaffolds ESL (and non-ESL) students’ content and language development. Mohan’s ‘Knowledge Framework’ (Mohan 1986, 2001) was used as a heuristic tool to analyse and discuss the ‘what’ of the unit – that is, the language and content demands – and the neo-Vygotskian Early and Hooper model (Early and Hooper 2001) was used to analyse the ‘how’. The teachers integrated language and content by creatively extending and varying these basic heuristics, systematically relating meaning in discourse to wording, at the macro-level of activity/social practice, at the micro-level of written and oral expression, and points in between.