ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the basic components of an essay before introducing the specific scaffold to build a paragraph, the ACCESS paragraph (Argue, Clarify, Confirm, Extract technique, Scrutinise, Synthesise, which are all explained). It builds on the work from the previous chapter; students can use the evaluative sentences they have practiced as the topic sentence or to ‘Argue.’ Instead of telling the students what they need to be doing at each interval, the scaffold introduces a series of carefully worded questions, building on each component of the paragraph. This steers the students’ thinking on the content and lets this shape what they write with support for sentence construction at each stage of the paragraph. By the end of this chapter teachers and other professionals will have a strategy for showing struggling students how to analyse and write about texts using an essay paragraph structure even when they don’t have an essay topic to address.
