Jenny Hammond
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.
Career
- BA (1971), MA Applied Linguistics (1983), PhD (1995), University of Sydney
- Lecturer at the University of Wollongong and Macquarie University, including NCELTR-era adult ESL work
- Associate Professor, Language and Literacy, Faculty of Education, UTS (1995–2008)
- Honorary Associate Professor, UTS (2008–present)
- Lead investigator on ARC projects including Putting Scaffolding to Work and Challenging Pedagogies, informing NSW Department of Education EAL/D policy
Published Work
- English for Social Purposes: A Handbook for Teachers of Adult Literacy (with Anne Burns, Helen Joyce, Daphne Brosnan & Linda Gerot, 1992, NCELTR) — a foundational articulation of the Sydney School genre approach and its Teaching-Learning Cycle
- Critical Literacy: Challenges and Questions for ESL Classrooms (with Beverly Derewianka, 1999)
- Scaffolding: Teaching and Learning in Language and Literacy Education (ed., 2001, PETA)
- "Putting Scaffolding to Work" (with Gibbons, Prospect, 2005) and the High Challenge, High Support papers (2006)
- Classrooms of Possibility (ed. with Miller, 2018) and Talking to Learn (ed. with Jones, 2019)
Influence
- Gave Australian EAL pedagogy its working vocabulary: designed-in vs contingent scaffolding, high-challenge/high-support, mainstream integration
- Helped consolidate the Sydney School Teaching-Learning Cycle as a shared framework across adult ESL and school literacy
- Shaped NSW EAL/D policy and teacher-education programmes through successive ARC-funded classroom studies
- Remains a reference point for anyone operationalising Vygotskian ideas in second-language classroom discourse