Build It and They Will Learn: Scaffolding Success

In When More Is Never Enough, we explored Problem 1: “We Need More,” the tendency to rely on additional English as an Additional Language (EAL) staffing and resources, and Opportunity 1: “We Need Different,” a call to rethink roles and practices to create a truly inclusive, multilingual learning culture. In A Promising Mythconception, we explored Problem 2: Every Teacher is a Language Teacher and Opportunity 2: All Teachers are Potential Language Teachers. The third article in this collaborative series sheds light on the powerful ways that intentional, effective scaffolding can provide multilingual learners with full access to their schools’ challenging curricula, both in terms of its content and the academic language through which it is delivered.                                                                                                                                        -Dr. Virginia Rojas

International schools continue to expand, serving 7.4 million students worldwide, a 45% increase since 2015 (ISC Research, 2025). Students come from around the world and, increasingly, from the local community. With such rapid growth, almost every international school campus is engaged in some form of construction, renovation, or expansion. The elaborate lattice of steel, or in some cases bamboo, is a familiar sight at schools around the world. This scaffolding supports the building of walls, windows, and doors for learning spaces and is systematically removed as the building takes shape; unfortunately, the parallel use of instructional scaffolding is often missing once students fill those classrooms. 

Problem 3: Simplifying, Segregating, and Sheltering

While we know that multilingualism can be a superpower for students (Marian & Shook, 2012; Callahan & Gándara, 2014), it presents educators with a critical challenge: how to ensure multilingual learners (MLs) can engage with grade-level content while they are simultaneously acquiring the complex language of schooling? Too often, this challenge is met with deficit-based approaches that require English proficiency as a prerequisite for meaningful participation in the curriculum (Nordmeyer et al., 2021). With good intentions but poor outcomes, teachers oversimplify complex texts, segregate students from challenging content or shelter students with watered-down versions of the curriculum. 

We must be careful not to conflate “support” with the reductive practice of simplifying content or language. Exposure to complex texts is necessary both for content learning and language development. Billings & Walqui (2017) offer an example, “while connectors make a sentence longer, they both alert and clearly establish the meaningful connection between the propositions made within a text” and without these important features, MLs are left with “little syntactic and semantic cohesion to support understanding” (2).

When MLs are insulated or segregated, they may be taught decontextualized language in pull out classes or limited to a watered-down version of the curriculum.  This well-intended but ill-advised simplification of materials, modification of tasks, and frontloading of isolated vocabulary, are all remnants of deficit thinking (Nordmeyer and Rojas, 2025). Assuming that students must acquire a particular variety of “academic” language, or to speak in complete sentences in English, before they can engage in meaningful learning limits opportunities for MLs (Wang et al., 2021). Reductive pedagogical approaches either deprive MLs of access to high quality, intellectually rich, discipline-based curricula or relegate content-area instruction to EAL teachers, who may lack content-area pedagogical knowledge (Walqui et al., 2025). When teachers are confused about their roles, it prevents valuable interdisciplinary professional collaboration, ultimately resulting in poor outcomes for MLs.  

Opportunity 3: Intentional and Specific Scaffolding

Addressing the systemic barriers facing MLs requires shifting the focus from fixing the student to fixing the instruction (Nordmeyer et al., 2019). When school leaders clarify teacher roles,  provide professional learning to help teachers enact those roles, and structure programs to integrate language with content, multilingual student outcomes improve (Theoharis & O’Toole, 2012; Blair et al., 2024). Multilingual learning specialists as consultants, collaborators, and coaches can help build capacity for all teachers to scaffold both content and language learning for MLs (Nordmeyer & Rojas, 2025)

Defining Scaffolding

Physical scaffolding enables workers to perform tasks they could not otherwise accomplish: working at heights to construct a building. Similarly, instructional scaffolding is an equitable, asset-based approach characterized by intentional, temporary, and adjustable yet non-negotiable support that bridges to the curriculum (van de Pol et al., 2010; Dove, Honigsfeld, & McDermott, 2024). "Scaffolding” refers to a process that uses structured activities to enable learners to solve problems that would otherwise be beyond their capacity (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Scaffolding can be viewed through a matrix of high versus low support and high versus low challenge. To engage meaningfully in learning, MLs must be situated in the quadrant with both high support and high challenge; without this balance, students encounter either frustration (high challenge but low support) or boredom (low challenge but high support), hindering academic growth (Gibbons, 2009). 

Scaffolding is not merely help; it is a deliberate integration of the learner into the learning process. Purpose-built to bridge students and the curriculum, it requires deep knowledge of both learners and learning. Balancing responsive language support with rigorous content engagement avoids a one-size-fits-all approach that can inadvertently hinder MLs’ active participation and conceptual growth (Athanases & de Oliveira, 2014; Alvarez et al., 2023; Johnson, 2021). Scaffolds for MLs must be adaptive, gradually releasing responsibility and increasing student autonomy (van de Pol et al., 2010). If the support never decreases, it is not a scaffold—it is a dependency, created by teachers who lack understanding of language acquisition. 

By “scaffolding up” rather than watering down, students encounter the language they need to learn – complex academic texts and rich discourse – rather than abridged content or simplified texts that ultimately slow academic progress. Building appropriate scaffolding for MLs requires understanding the role that language plays in every classroom. Language and content learning are simultaneous and interdependent. In a "language-based approach to content instruction," teachers don't merely provide general support; rather, they intentionally scaffold the specific linguistic demands of the subject matter to make content learning visible and accessible (Blair et al., 2024).

An extensive review of scaffolding for MLs is beyond the scope of this article; several authors have written excellent resources about how to categorize and apply scaffolding for MLs. For example, Dove, Honigsfeld, and McDermott (2025) have described nine dimensions of scaffolding: sensory, graphic, interactive, linguistic, metacognitive, procedural, affective, technological, and disciplinary. Likewise, de Olivera (2016) outlines the Six Cs of support for scaffolding content area instruction for MLs: connection, culture, code-breaking, challenge, community/collaboration, and classroom interactions. Walqui and Bunch (2019) have outlined three tiers of scaffolding: macro-scaffolding (unit level), meso-scaffolding (lesson/task level), and micro-scaffolding (interaction level). 

The themes below illustrate three specific ways scaffolding supports multilingual learners.

Build on learners’ assets: Each learner brings prior knowledge, home/community connections, and their passions or interests. Anyone who has witnessed the excitement in students decoding Pokémon cards, explaining a beloved national dish or deciphering a website about their favorite sport knows that identifying and building on student interests helps to frame learning in a very personal way. There is no need to "start from scratch" when we can tap into what learners already know and can do.

• Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: Teachers can build metacognition and deepen comprehension by allowing students to draw on their full linguistic repertoires and sophisticated cultural knowledge to make sense of new information. For example, students might interview grandparents to learn about a particular historical event, write multilingual personal narratives to describe their learning journey, or analyze a pop song in their home language to understand poetic devices. 
• Graphic Organizers: Rather than reducing the complexity of a task, educators can use graphic organizers to help students map out what they already know: key concepts and relationships. This scaffolds the cognitive task, allowing students to demonstrate their existing conceptual knowledge while they simultaneously acquire the necessary language.

Make rigorous grade-level content accessible: Scaffolding does not mean simplifying the thinking; it means making the complex thinking process visible. Our goal should be to "amplify, not simplify" the curriculum (Walqui & Bunch, 2019). We can provide multiple means of understanding across modalities through “message abundancy” (Gibbons, 2015). Thus, we apprentice students into the disciplinary practices of mathematicians, scientists, and historians 

• Modeling and Think-Alouds: Rather than simplifying the thinking, teachers can make a complex thinking process visible. For example, teachers might model the process of analyzing data or co-write together with students. A “think-aloud” shows MLs the cognitive moves an expert makes, allowing them to internalize the underlying norms and disciplinary literacy embedded in academic tasks (Gibbons, 2015). 
• Text Engineering: Engineering and deconstructing texts involves both the “strategic amplification (not simplification) of the language of a text through additional linguistic clues and redundancy” and the intentional annotation and adaptation of key structural components (Billings & Walqui, 2017). This helps to make complex language accessible while making the text’s organization and features more visible.

Promote student agency and engage student voice: Walqui & Bunch (2019) describe "contingent scaffolding"—the responsive, moment-to-moment support a teacher provides during a conversation.

• Translanguaging: Translanguaging spaces are instructional environments where using multiple languages is deliberately planned and promoted. This shifts the view of translanguaging from a "random occurrence" to an intentional instructional scaffold that can be built into lessons, for example planning for translanguaging brainstorming as a prewriting activity.
• Recasting: Rephrasing, prompting, or "proleptically" treating a student’s partial answer as if it were a full, expert thought helps them bridge the gap. When recasting student’s ideas with complex language, teachers can both assign competence and scaffold disciplinary literacy (Jilk et al, 2024).

Creating Blueprints for Learning

Around the world, international schools continue to grow, and school leaders continue to invest in the physical scaffolding necessary to build the most innovative, functional, and safe learning spaces for tomorrow’s students. Likewise, investment in instructional scaffolding can empower all teachers to design and use approaches that balance challenge and support for multilingual learners, reduce barriers, and build on students’ assets. If we build it, they will learn. 

Further Reading

• Dove, M. G., Honigsfeld, A., & McDermott, M. (2024). Nine dimensions of scaffolding for multilingual learners. Corwin.
• Walqui, A., Bunch, G. C., & Mueller, P. (Eds.). (2025). Amplifying the curriculum: Designing quality learning opportunities for multilingual learners (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. 

References

Blair, A., de Oliveira, L. C., & Avalos, M. A. (2024). Expanding teacher understanding of scaffolding for multilingual learners using a language-based approach to content instruction. TESOL in Context, 33(1), 25–42. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1458651.pdf

Billings, E., & Walqui, A. (2017). De-mystifying complex texts: What are “complex” texts and how can we ensure ELLs/MLLs can access them? New York State Education Department. https://www.wested.org/resource/demystifying-complex-texts/

Boche, B., & Henning, B. (2015). Visual Literacy and the Multilingual Learner. TESOL Press.

Gibbons, P. (2015). Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning: Teaching English language learners in the mainstream classroom (2nd ed.). Heinemann.

Hamman-Ortiz, L., Dougherty, C., Tian, Z., Palmer, D., & Poza, L. (2025). Translanguaging at school: A systematic review of U.S. PK-12 translanguaging research. System, 129, Article 103594. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2025.103594

Jilk, L. M., Ruef, J. L., & Torres, A. (2024). Inclusive classrooms and assigning competence. Intercultural Education, 36(1), 111–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2024.2426934

Nordmeyer, J., Boals, T., Westerlund, R. and MacDonald, R. (2019). What Does Equity Really Mean for Multilingual Learners? ASCD Ed Leadership, 14(12).

Nordmeyer, J. and Rojas, V. (2025). When More is Never Enough, It’s Time to Think Differently. The International Educator (TIE Online). 

van de Pol, J., Volman, M., & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in teacher–student interaction: A decade of research. Educational Psychology Review.

Walqui, A. (2006). Scaffolding instruction for English language learners: A conceptual framework. International Journal of English Studies.

Wang, S., Lang, N., Bunch, G. C., Basch, S., McHugh, S. R., Huitzilopochtli, S., & Callanan, M. (2021). Dismantling persistent deficit narratives about the language and literacy of culturally and linguistically minoritized children and youth: Counter-possibilities. Frontiers in Education, 6, Article 641796. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.641796

Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89-100.