Transition or enrichment? Form-focused language scaffolding strategies across Dutch secondary bilingual education classes and Dutch reception classes

An increasing number of learners worldwide follow some or all of their secondary education in a second language. In the Netherlands, two contexts in which this commonly occurs are bilingual education programs, which promote the acquisition of English, and Dutch-medium reception classes for newly-arrived migrant students. In these contexts, teachers have the additional responsibility to scaffold language learning in their content-based lessons. However, very few studies focus on the type of language scaffolds that teachers employ. This study provides an overview of form-focused language scaffolding strategies used by teachers teaching citizenship-related subjects in both contexts. The inquiry focused on scaffolding strategies reported and employed by seventeen teachers across 33 interviews and 44 lessons. The investigation identified thirteen different strategies. Findings reveal that both contexts used forms-focused scaffolding: word-level strategies targeted productive demands, while sentence- and text-level scaffolding addressed both receptive and productive needs. In reception classes, word-level strategies predominated in frequency and variety, whereas Dutch bilingual secondary education teachers focused most extensively on text-level scaffolding to support productive demands. The transitional nature of reception programs and the enriching nature of bilingual education can help us understand this distribution. Understanding language scaffolding repertoires can help to realise multilingual education’s central promise.