Nik Peachey, Morocco
If you provide your students with 'scaffolding', you are providing them with expectations and support to help them understand. An example of this might be raising their awareness of some of the features of genre before doing a listening or reading exercise. Because mosts genre of audio or written texts have common features, raising awareness of the one they may be trying to understand gives students a framework around which to develop their understanding of what they hear or read. Exercises that involve a list of events which the students read first and then put into the correct order in response to a text would provide scaffolding, because the students would expect those events to be included within the text and they would know what they had to watch out for.

Miguel Lorenzo B. Garcia, Philippines
Scaffolding is the act of helping students understand something that is too difficult for their level. It could also mean helping the student develop a skill that is too advanced. One activity that can involve scaffolding is in teaching figures of speech. If the students can't determine what type figure of speech is the example, then the teacher should point out the words that will help the students classify the example.

Devon, China/UK
In a broad sense you are helping them to reach a higher level through support. So it can be something as basic (with young learners) as showing them by example how to label things/write their name for them to copy or even doing it for them as they spell it or guiding their hand in writing letters. Or with learners who are exploring story narrative they may choose the characters and setting etc but you actually scribe the story for them.
Obviously you can see I deal with young learners but the principle is the same. You need to first access where they are NOW and support them to progress further by helping them to see what the next step is and then help them to achieve it.

Paul Kebble, Australia
Scaffolding refers to the creation of a pedagogical framework from which the teacher is able to guide the learner towards specific outcomes. The teacher plans a lesson so that students are able to arrive at the predetermined conclusion through their interactions and negotiations with the teacher and peers. Scaffolding, in its simplest form, can be misconstrued as ‘instruction' if the teacher's pedagogical strategy appears too regulated.

The following is an example of pedagogical scaffolding where the aim of a lesson is for students to understand the conceptual use of the ‘passive voice' + ‘made', e.g. this soccer ball was made in India. The teacher would plan the lesson to: 1) provide realia, 2) initiate a general discussion, 3) guide the discussion towards the ball and its production, 4) focus on the ‘where', 5) guide students to the language required to describe the event, 6) elicit the perceived structure, 7) record the student-provided structures and refine, 8) provide practice through further investigations e.g. provide further realia and ask students to discover where items were made, ask students work in groups and feed back results, 9) questioning and negation are introduced, and so on.

This lesson would be conducted in an atmosphere of investigation and negotiation with the teacher providing the lesson's directional structure through guided interaction. It is important in scaffolding to give value to all student input and respect, and give credence to, different avenues that the students may wish to pursue, but ultimately the teacher arrives at the pre-planned outcome.

Bahia Aquesbi, Morocco
Scaffolding is a supporting framework. Scaffolded learning is a teaching strategy that helps support students in their learning when they may have difficulties. A goal of scaffolded learning is to have students use a particular strategy independently.