GOOD FOR EAL, GOOD FOR ALL

EAL and Multilingualism Coordinator, Barbara Stoecker thinks that the techniques used for EAL learning can have real impact in first language classes.
The labels we use

EAL (English as an Additional Language) is an interesting label. I first came across it 9 years ago in my first year of teacher training. It was mentioned alongside SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, PP (Pupil Premium) and MA (More Able) as a tool of student classification in one’s classroom.

I have to be honest – coming from an Eastern-European country and culture – I was blown away by how much teachers in the UK are meant not only to know, but also understand about each one of their students “in order to support their learning in the best way possible”, at least that’s what I was told. As time has passed, however, it was the EAL teaching techniques I learned early in my initial teacher training (ITT) that were the real keys to my survival!

Making things sustainable

9 years is not so long.

I still remember late evenings spent on meticulously drawn-up lesson plans outlining separate strategies for each class, for Kate (the MA student), Reuben (the severely dyslexic student), Omar (the EAL student with a lack of basic understanding in English sentence structure) and Jasmine (the emotionally fragile SEND girl who loved writing, but would never accept sharing it in front of the whole class).

“This is unsustainable” were the words clattering in my head as I was going to bed around midnight, or waking up at 5am to finish planning the day ahead. 9 years later, I can confirm the statement, but I only utter the words when speaking to trainee teachers or when delivering CPD sessions on adaptive teaching and differentiation for EAL students; it no longer applies to my practice, even if, just like right now, and like so many others, I still happen to work at the weekends.

Time used poorly

Being EAL myself, my first/home/native (pick one) language is Polish, I felt instantly drawn to this category of students and, quite frankly, I could relate to and bond with them quicker than with others. Although I was fluent in English when starting my teaching career, I remember my first year at University in Paris, studying Korean in French (yes, I really like languages). I still remember some lectures about Chinese Ancient History in French. Two and a half hours of white noise recorded on paper as three to five words and half a page of carefully coloured squares. Over a decade later, I would find Omar and many other EAL students presenting me with the same “quality” of work produced in their lessons.

TESOL techniques for all

This natural affinity with speakers of other languages quickly turned into the driving force and pedagogical philosophy behind my teaching. It was like a flash back, I had to, and could do something about it, so I started planning my sessions thinking of the EAL students first. I found the approach had a wider importance.

Here’s just some  of the numerous TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) techniques I found to work with all my students:

1. TTT < STT

(Teacher Talking Time should be less than Student Talking Time)

This is one of the pillars of language learning; the more your students speak in lessons, the more practice they get and the more opportunities of correction arise for the teacher.

2. Spend some time on learning objectives

“This may be good in MFL, but we can’t really afford to spend 20 minutes of a lesson chatting about the learning objectives”  I was told this by much more experienced colleagues from Science and Humanities Departments . . .

The cynical me was wondering how they’d defend spending similar amounts of time trying to cut down low-level disruption .  . .  The professional me reached out for a back-up in research. Robin Alexander (University of Cambridge) claims that,

“High-quality classroom talk raises standards in the core subjects as typically measured in national and international tests.”

3. Use key terms

If we encourage all our students to speak / narrate / describe verbally key terms and concepts introduced in lessons, we give them space for (literally) ‘invisible mistakes’ and reduce cognitive load associated with processing and transcription of new language. “And what if their English isn’t good enough to speak about photosynthesis?”, I hear you ask? Then we let them do it in their first language pairing them with a speaker of the same level (if possible), or why not embrace the most recent technological gift – AI- and ask them to speak and interact with a bot in their first language. This is probably the least effort for the biggest return. If we want to take it one step further, we can provide sentence starters, word banks or word clouds for students to use as a scaffold.

4. Getting into the habit

Finally, as we’re creatures of habit, we need to make it an intrinsic part of our lessons; all our students should expect to have to talk using the terms used by the teacher in every lesson, whether correctly or not, is a secondary problem. Let’s get them into the habit of speaking first, ALL of them.

And if you’re still not convinced, here’s what researchers from University of Reading have to say:

 “Embedding oracy into everyday teaching works. It helps multilingual learners thrive academically and socially, and it promotes inclusive classrooms where every child’s voice is heard.”

Barbara Stoecker is EAL and Multilingualism Coordinator at  Claremont School in the UK

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