Strategy: Guiding question: What did you find interesting/important/surprising?

What I found to be the most interesting in this study analysis of scaffolding for second language writers is the actual breakdown of the process that the author makes. I had never realized, so far, how complex the process of guiding students through completing their first essay can be. To me, it seemed natural to approach the process with a “decontextualizing” type of approach, that is to say analysing a short essay in term of content, than in term of structure and identifying the important elements of it before “recontextualizing” the content into a meaningful writing task. Now I understand better the importance of scaffolding for academic essay production. I realized the importance, as I read Cotteral & Cohen (2003), of providing students with topics that are concurrent with study themes because it facilitates recycling of arguments seen previously for certain topics. Since argumentation is more easily structured, one can focus on modelling an essay structure with his student without worrying too much about the “basic” argumentative elements that they’ll be using inside the paragraphs. In my opinion, though, the author should have done a group brainstorm before structuring and modelling the essay and ask his students, later as they come to the point of writing the paragraphs, to take out their brainstorm note-sheets to add content to what they’re saying.