A Scaffolding Strategy to Help Experienced ELLs Express Complex Ideas

Prompts that require students to make a claim, support it with evidence, and provide reasoning are common across the curriculum, especially in secondary classes. Teachers often provide scaffolds such as paragraph frames, visual cues like the hamburger paragraph structure, or acronyms like CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) and RACE (Restate the question, Answer the question, Cite the evidence, Explain the evidence).

However, even with these scaffolds, experienced multilingual learners often ask, “How do I start?” Because these scaffolds provide only the big picture for organizing an argumentative paragraph, they often fail to provide students with the language required for each part of the structure. Therefore, multilingual learners are frequently at a loss for how to write each section of the paragraph, even if they understand the big picture and know the content. These students require explicit instruction on how to develop their ideas for each part of the paragraph and effectively link one idea to the next. We want students spending cognitive energy on what they know, not trying to figure out how to start.

In this article, we provide suggestions for supporting multilingual learners in writing cohesive responses to these types of prompts. We focus specifically on a subgroup of multilingual learners we call experienced multilinguals. These students have been learning in English for several years and are no longer at the beginning levels of language proficiency. This group of students are capable of effectively responding to these types of prompts when they are explicitly taught the language and content required.

Embedded scaffolds

When our experienced multilinguals struggled to write cohesive, argumentative paragraphs, we were determined to provide more effective scaffolds that also taught them the skills they needed to write this type of paragraph independently. We now offer embedded scaffolds within our paragraph structures, such as CER. Embedded scaffolds, a strategy discussed in our forthcoming Corwin book (April 2026), are explicit instructions that include the language features that students need to respond to each part of the paragraph. These instructions often identify a particular word or phrase students should use to start their sentence (e.g., When, Even though, Since, Because), but they generally do not provide a complete sentence starter. 

Claim. To start the claim, we teach students how to use a strategy we call sentence mirroring. This embedded scaffold facilitates answering the prompt directly by using most of the phrasing in the prompt except for question words (e.g., who, what, how) or thinking verbs (e.g., explain, persuade, justify).

For example, take the prompt, “Explain how increasing global temperatures lead to sea-level rise.” Using the sentence mirroring strategy, the response would start with “Increasing global temperatures lead to sea-level rise by…” We teach students to remove the Explain how and start their response with the rest of the prompt, resulting in the first part of a precise claim. Students would provide the rest of the claim using the knowledge they learned from the lesson. We also teach them that the phrase by + verb(ing) is one way to answer any question that starts with Explain how.

When teachers demonstrate how to use this strategy and provide students with opportunities to practice it with every short answer they write, experienced multilinguals quickly learn how to write their own sentence starters. This frees up their cognitive energy to focus on the content in their answers rather than the question of “How do I start?”

Evidence. The phrases that often start the “Evidence” section of the CER include expressions such as According to, An example of this is, and For instance. The goal of these phrases is to signal to readers that the writer is presenting specific facts that can include statistics, places, events, dates, and names of people and groups.

For phrases such as According to, we teach students that the name of an article, an author, an organization, or an institution must be given in the sentence, in addition to the fact. For instance, a sentence in this part of the paragraph might be written as follows: “According to NASA, the last century has seen a consistent increase in sea-level temperatures around the world’s oceans.” NASA is cited as the source of the fact, which includes a specified duration of time and an observable phenomenon. 

To teach students how to introduce evidence, we instruct them to cite the name of the author or an institution, such as a university, company, or organization. After they write the introductory phrase and cite the source, we have students provide the relevant fact connected to the claim. To scaffold this, we suggest that students use any of these types of facts as evidence:

• Specific names of important people/organizations
• The place where an event occurred
• A date/period of time when something occurred
• A statistic
• A phenomenon

In our NASA example, the phrase “last century” indicates a time period, the “increase in sea-level temperatures” expresses a phenomenon, “around the world” communicates a location, and “the oceans” are identified as the location. While the particular facts that students choose do not have to include all types of evidence, the more specific the evidence is, the more easily students can refer to it when supporting their claim.

Reasoning. After presenting evidence through factual details, students need to explain how those facts support the claim in the “Reasoning” section. We scaffold this section by suggesting that students use Since or Because. Sentences that begin with these phrases should directly refer back to the evidence. More important, the reference to the evidence is used to substantiate the claim.

Returning to the evidence for global warming provided by NASA, a sentence that shows reasoning might be written as “Since the sea-level temperatures have risen, this warming causes land-based and sea-based ice to melt.” Often, one sentence that mentions the evidence does not sufficiently support the claim. Therefore, we also teach students that they can use Because to start their second sentence to explain further the evidence supporting the claim. In this example, that sentence could be “Because the warmer temperatures cause the ice to melt, the melting ice turns into water that flows into the ocean and causes the sea level to rise steadily.”

Writing this “Reasoning” section is often the most difficult for experienced multilinguals. They tell us that the evidence speaks for itself and no further explanation is needed. To help them understand why the reasoning portion of their argument is so essential, we might share a meme or joke with the class. When some students understand the joke, but others do not, we have them explain it to the whole class. This “reasoning” is similar to the type of explanation the factual evidence requires as well.

We are big fans of structures such as CER, as they scaffold academic writing. Our aim is to demonstrate to teachers how incorporating a specific sentence structure into each part of CER can significantly benefit experienced multilinguals, who often grasp the concepts but struggle to express their ideas clearly and effectively. With the suggestions provided in this article, we hope that teachers have a clear strategy to support experienced multilinguals as they produce CER (and other types of) paragraphs. By doing this, all teachers become teachers of academic language.