Action Research: Bridging the Gap: Using Scaffolding Strategies to Adapt the English Curriculum for First-Year Secondary Students in Puebla

Action Research:

Bridging the Gap: Using Scaffolding Strategies to Adapt the English Curriculum for First-Year Secondary Students in Puebla 

I want to talk about a very real and difficult problem in Mexican public education. Most children in elementary schools do not have English classes, but when they enter middle school, their textbooks require an advanced B1 level. This creates a huge learning gap, and students get frustrated very fast. As a future secondary teacher, I wanted to find a real solution, so in this presentation, I explain my Action Research project. I will show you how we can use scaffolding strategies and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to adapt the heavy curriculum. Watch the video to see how simple visual aids and sentence frames can help our students understand the lessons and finally bridge this difficult gap.

It is important to mention that my action research focuses on middle school because that is where I will teach in the future with this degree. However, I had to apply the project in an elementary school for now because that is where I am currently working.

This activity was for a big group of 35 second-graders in an elementary school. At the age of 8, many of these kids are still struggling to read and write in their native language. Because of that, I decided not to write the sentences on the board. I thought it would just make things too complicated for them. In the end, I couldn’t even finish the whole activity because the regular teacher came back to take over the classroom early.

To be honest, the kids didn’t show much interest at first. Before starting, I asked them if they wanted to have an English class, but less than half said yes. The rest looked totally indifferent, like I was speaking a completely foreign language to them. Most of them tried to participate, but a lot of kids weren't paying attention at all and started doing other things. Also, the class was constantly interrupted because so many students kept asking to go to the bathroom.

The main idea was a speaking exercise with a question and an answer. I tried to prepare them step by step using a puppet:

1. First, I showed them how to do it using the puppet.
2. Then, I did the dialogue with the puppet and one student.
3. Next, I put them to work in pairs.
4. Finally, I wanted some pairs to present in front of everyone.

To choose who passed to the front, we played a game. One student had to throw the puppet backward over their shoulder, and whoever caught it had to come up and practice.

Even though I tried to be super specific, modeled with the puppet, and made them repeat everything in chorus, the instructions just weren’t clear enough. Many kids didn’t understand what to do. When we started the exercise, instead of answering my question, they just repeated the question back to me. Now that I reflect on it, I really needed to translate the meaning of both phrases. That way, they could see the difference between the question and the answer.

Pair work was also really hard to manage. A lot of kids didn't do the activity and just started talking about other things. When it was their turn to stand in front of the class, they froze. They looked confused or scared, so I had to whisper the words into their ears to help them speak.

One thing that worked was walking around the room. When I saw they weren't practicing, I went to their desks to check how they were doing the activity. If a student was totally lost, I repeated everything with them until they finally spoke. The problem is that with 35 students, this took too much time, and the other kids got distracted. It was funny because a lot of kids really wanted to volunteer and pass to the front, but once they were up there facing the group, they got scared and forgot what to say.