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

In this paper, I wish to explore and apply a selected range of the possible
strategies and methods of scaffolding text‐based 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 (German‐English) seem to be only for privileged students (cf. Zydatiß 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
text‐based 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 text‐based 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 module in this
exemplary textbook G21 one wonders how much language‐related scaffolding was
included by the editors due to the real didactical needs of the learners and might have
been left out in the process of laying out the textbook and the limitations of space in a
due to content?