Sentence Stems in Class

This past week I have been helping students to write biographies while I observe my CT teach english. They are doing something called a "hero" project where students can look at individuals who have done positive things in the face of difficult situations. I think about a third of my class is ELL students, and my teacher chooses to use sentence starters to scaffold the use of "academic" language. For example, in a worksheet in the conclusions, students choose a sentence starters like this one: "In conclusion, _______ (put your hero here)" has given us a ("gift" or "legacy") that lasts today in the form of_____________ (finish the sentence). The teacher briefly modeled each sentence using only one example. The students wrote about half of these sentences incorrectly in some way. Many of them filled in the blanks, then went on to write a whole sentence in the final blank that stood alone.

The challenge here is how to teach students academic language. I think that these phrases are very important, but that enough scaffolding was not given. The end result was that I went arround briefly trying to ask students to correct their own mistakes, and then usually ending up correcting incorrect entries and showing them why it was correct. It is an open question as to whether this works. I would like to see if students can use these sentence stems in the future without help or not.