Scaffolding Questions, prompts and nonverbal communication enabling learners to complete tasks which they could not have managed on their own (Wood et al., 1976).

Breaking down ideas into smaller parts

 Visual and graphic support (Pictures, Venn diagrams, mind maps, tables, charts)  Make key words memorable – repetition, paraphrasing, matching up.  Give activities before reading or listening tasks to prepare students.  Reinforce understanding of key concepts and key words after reading/listening tasks.  ‘Model’ activities such as role-plays with a colleague or a bright student first.  Give students language frames to guide written work or glossaries.  Code switching – alternating between the 2 languages.  Making tasks accessible if a text/audio is very difficult to understand.

1) The prince & princess activity as an alternative to a gap-fill? 2) The George Washington info-gap activity? 3) The greenhouse effect info-gap with pictures activity? 4) Re-ordering sentences about the greenhouse effect? 5) The text on Karl Marx.

The task assigned to a text determines the level of difficulty just as much as the text itself.

 Introduce the general topic [activation]  Prediction  Pre-teach vocabulary, if necessary  Gist task – with a time limit – to give the students a ‘flavour’ of the text  Detailed reading – scanning for information and analysis at sentence level  Discussion – don’t ignore the actual content of the text!  Follow-up/extension task – students prepare a written or spoken piece on the topic