Parents’ Scaffolding Literacy Using L1 in an ESL Child’s Factual Writing Development

This study examines how effectively an ESL child develops the ability to work with various factual texts, such as reports, explanations and reviews, which are quite different from spoken language. It is known that many ESL children have difficulty dealing with factual texts that are composed of challenging abstract words and content along with unfamiliar schematic structures. In this longitudinal case study, the parent’s scaffolding literacy using L1 (Korean) at home was applied to an ESL Korean boy in an Australian context in order to effectively improve his performance on factual texts in accordance with school curriculum. The researcher made the participant observation on him at home and school through the study period; and literacy-related practices along with contexts were documented in field notes and all the factual writing products were collected. With the successful results of his factual writing development, text analysis focusing on lexico-grammatical features and schematic structures in relation to written language revealed two major implications: (1) development of various factual writing is significantly important in that it heightens young children’s awareness of differences between spoken and written languages; (2) especially with ESL children, parents need to support their children’s factual writing development as facilitators using a scaffolding approach in the mother tongue when their children encounter cognitively challenging concepts along with subject-specific terms.