‘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.