In the previous sections, I have illustrated how learners need both support and challenges. By examining teacher and learner roles I have started to describe how complex support in my BFC classroom is. Support also needs to be considered in relation to what it is supporting. In my research, I have identified this in general as challenges. 1 have started to explore the interdependence between challenges and support in Part 2 when describing the '2 in in the BFC and have examined this further in Part 3 by looking at teacher and learner roles in my BFC classroom. In order to analyse the relationship between challenges and support more systematically, I focus in this section initially on one particular form of support: scaffolding. Bruner (1983: 60) describes scaffolding within the context of child- mother peekaboo games:
One sets the game, provides a scaffold to ensure that the child's ineptimdes can be rescued or rectified by appropriate intervention, and then removes the scaffold part by part as the reciprocal strucmre can stand on its own.
(Bruner, 1983; 60)
Bruner describes the scaffold as a means to overcome 'the child's ineptitudes [...] by appropriate intervention.' He also points out that 'the scaffold' is a temporary structure: a form of support that is constantiy altered and ultimately removed until 'the reciprocal structure can stand on its own.' So far, two key features of his 'scaffold' are clearly identifiable:
• It is apppropriate to the learner's needs. • It is temporary.
Scaffolding is a term that came into use in the early 1980s and refers to the provision of a temporary, adjustable support (like a builder's strucmre) that is provided by a teacher to assist smdents develop and extend their skills in the early phases of instruction.
(Ashman and Conway, 1997; 97)
Ashman and Conway (1997: 97) also describe key characteristics of scaffolding: • Scaffolding is temporary.
• Scaffolding is adjustable.
These two key features echo those identified before from Bruner's writing (scaffolding as temporary and appropriate). Chamot-Uhl and O'Malley (1994: 65- 66) locate the notion of scaffolding as part of strategy instruction within CLIL:
Scaffolding or providing strong support early when the strategy is introduced and withdrawing support over time is an essential component of a teacher's repertoire for strategy instruction.
(Chamot-Uhl and O'Malley, 1994; 65-66)
Chamot-Uhl and O'Malley (1994: 65-66) seem to locate scaffolding or 'providing strong support' purely at a strategic level in However, as pointed out before in relation to Mercer (1995) and as has become clear from the previous discussion of my data, the CLIL scaffolding is more than just strategic support: Through combining content and foreign language learning, the scaffolding is dual: it needs to support both foreign language learning and content learning. At the same time, the combining of subject and content learning contains already an implicit scaffolding: the foreign language supports the learning of content and the learning of content supports the learning of the foreign language. This implicit and explicit dual scaffolding relates also to van Lier's (1996: 48) notion of 'participatability': the combined learning of a foreign language and content allows for the learner to participate through and to engage with content in a foreign language.
Bruner's work on scaffolding can be considered as the development of one particular feature of Vygotsky's ZPD. Mercer (1995: 73-75) comments on this overlap between Vygotskian learning theory and Bruner's work in tiiis area:
So Vygotsky's theory, more than Piaget's, has room in it for teachers as well as learners. draws our attention to the construction of knowledge as a joint achievement. Vygotsky provides us with a theory of the development of thought and language. His insights offer us a great deal that is relevant to understanding the relationship between a teacher and an individual learner, though he did not observe and explain how language is acmally used to teach and to learn. However, Jerome Bruner has followed Vygotsky's line of interest and has studied the language of teaching and learning, mainly through observing young children interacting with their mothers. He uses the concept of 'scaffolding' to highlight the way that one person can become very intimately, and productively, involved in someone else's learning.
(Mercer, 73)
Mercer (1995: 73-74) goes on to locate the notion of scaffolding within psychology and education:
'Scaffolding' is an attractive concept for both psychology and education because it offers a neat metaphor for the active and sensitive involvement of a teacher in a smdent's learning. As well as being used by developmental psychologists smdying parents and infants, it has been used in anthropological research into how craft skills (like weaving) are passed on from an expert to a novice, in simations where the expert is often more concerned with getting the job done than with teaching.
(Mercer, 1995; 73-74)
He then goes on to point out the differences between classroom teaching and learning and other teaching and learning settings:
A theory of the guided construction of knowledge in schools cannot be built upon comparisons with teaching and learning in other settings. To be the concept of 'scaffolding' must be reinterpreted to fit the classroom. One useful step would be to get away from the imagery of concrete, physical tasks like doing jigsaws or weaving cloth. Education is not about the physical manipulation of objects. A great deal of it is learning how to use language - to represent ideas, to interpret experiences, to formulate problems and to solve them.
(Mercer, 1995; 74-75)
Mercer relates the notion of scaffolding in a classroom setting directiy to 'learning how to use language.' This statement reflects the conclusions of the Bullock Report (DES, 1975) pointing at the role of each teacher as a language teacher and is to a certain extent reflected in cognitive learning approaches such as CASE (Adey, 1988, 1995, 1999) or Higher Thinking Skills-approaches (Leaf, 1998). In relation to CLIL, Mercer's statement relates back to Mohan's (1986: 1) argument that 'it is
absurd to ignore the role of languages as a medium of learning in the content class' and that therefore it is the task of every (language) teacher 'to organize content material to support language learning.' (Mohan, 1986: iv) This is especially important as both content and language are the subjects of study in a CLIL classroom: in order for content to be accessible to the learners it is scaffolded through the foreign language and at the same time, the learning of content supports, or scaffolds, the learning of the foreign language. In this regard, CLIL can offer a
dual scaffolding for the learners. This dual scaffolding is one of the key features of
CLIL approaches as I will illustrate in the following section through my data.
At the beginning of this section, I have identified key features of scaffolding as temporary, appropriate and adjustable. The authors examined seem to locate scaffolding at the level of skills instruction. However, as Mercer (1995: 74) has pointed out 'the concept of "scaffolding" must be reinterpreted to fit the classroom.' As I have illustrated in my previous discussion in relation to teacher and learner roles in my BFC classroom, support is affected by and affects classroom interaction. This also means that scaffolding is only one particular form of support. Of course, scaffolding can support 'learning how to use language' (Mercer, 1995: 75). However, support goes beyond skills instruction. Applied to CLIL, both the learning of content and the learning of a foreign language needs to be supported. Within a Vygotskian model of instruction, this also ensues that learning is ahead of development. Phrased differently, CLIL is challenging as the former headteacher has pointed out. This challenging learning is also specific: it is learning content through a foreign language. Learning as ahead of development also needs to be achievable for the learners: it needs to be both challenging and supported. Learning can therefore only happen if there is a certain tension that the learners have described in the interviews with terms such as 'easy' and 'difficult'. This tension directs the support that the learners need in order to overcome the challenges that they are confronted with. Hence, before examining support for the learners, I focus in the following section first on the tension between 'easy' and 'difficult' as identified by the interviewees.