Jennifer (Jenny) Hammond is an Australian applied linguist whose work has done more than almost anyone's to turn scaffolding from a metaphor into a usable classroom theory for EAL learners. She was Associate Professor in Language and Literacy at the University of Technology Sydney from 1995 to 2008 and has remained an Honorary Associate Professor there since, following earlier posts at the University of Wollongong and Macquarie University, including NCELTR-linked work on adult ESL.
Hammond reads Vygotsky as a pedagogical programme, not a slogan. Her central argument, developed across a long collaboration with Pauline Gibbons, is that EAL students progress when classrooms combine high intellectual challenge with high language support, and that scaffolding has to be specified as both designed-in (planned at the unit and task level) and contingent (moment-by-moment in interaction). That distinction has shaped how teacher educators in Australia and beyond talk about support.