scaffolding
n.— «Another emerging trend in coursework is the use by pupils in their coursework of structures handed down by their teachers, a practice known as “scaffolding”. Moderators said that they had seen some very obvious similarities in the work of different pupils and it had been difficult to distinguish between them. They found that pupils in the same class began paragraphs with the same sentences, and paragraphs followed the same running order.» —“Exam board surprise at ‘obvious plagiarism’ in coursework” by Katherine Demopoulos Guardian (U.K.) Nov. 3, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Ophelia in Johnson City, Tennessee, wonders about the exclamation her great-grandmother often used when something surprised her: Cat bristle! That may be her own version of a minced oath, although it fits with the idea of how a cat’s tail might look...
“Scaffolding” as an educational term’s been around since at least the early 70s, when Krashen was working on “scaffolding” non-native speaker students in regular classes at the University of Ottawa.