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
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...
“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.