KNOWING OUR STUDENTS

USING STUDENT LANGUAGE DATA TO START THE YEAR

Barbara Stoecker continues her series of articles, Good for EAL, Good for All by suggesting that actively using certain data in student profiles as part of pre-year CPD preparation gets everyone focused on learning needs from day 1 – whether or not students are EAL learners.

A new year

August and September is special for schools – at least in the Northern Hemisphere! It’s the exciting time, when we’re coming back (hopefully!) refreshed, often full of ideas and enthusiasm to try new things. By the end of August, we also get to a point where we may actually miss our students!

There will generally be a fair number of new staff and there will always be new students and new class assignments. EAL teachers have a bit of an advantage, teaching many of the same students from year to year, but if knowing your students is the most important factor in providing effective support, none of us are as familiar with student needs in September as we were in July.

And the longer we teach, the more we understand how crucial students’ trust is for building confidence. At the beginning of the school year, we can take little for granted, and for many EAL learners, there may, of course, have been far less exposure to English for the past two months. It’s important we get to know them again quickly.

So, for me, the main question we should be asking ourselves at this time of year are how can we rebuild our knowledge of our returning students and construct a valid picture of the newbies. I would guess that pretty much every school will have a range of data to hand for new and returning students available for this purpose – but do we always make best use of it as we prepare for the new year? While it seems like such an obvious idea to consult student profiles in order to reset, it might be worth thinking about how the data can best be used at this time of year.

Data to look out for

What kind of information might we be on the lookout for in order to support new and returning learners? For native English speakers, reading age data, often available through NGRT (New Group Reading Tests) and easily trackable with Reading Programmes such as ‘Class Reader’ can be excellent indicators. It is not quite so straightforward when it comes to EAL students, but here are some ideas to consider when reading EAL student profiles – whatever you teach.

See if there is a record of their first language and of any other languages spoken by the student. The first language information, if robust and reliable, can unlock so much more. Knowing a student’s literacy level in their first language can also help avoid SEN-misdiagnosis.
A record of reading age in English can indicate vocabulary breadth and depth, but it does not give us reliable information about reading ability in their first language and what comes with it – their potential for verbal and written eloquence or their decoding skills (Dixon et al. 2020).
Therefore, an EAL student’s ‘reading age’ in English should always be interpreted with care and used in comparison with other useful indicators such as non-verbal or mathematical reasoning scores: a student may obtain a low reading age score because of English vocabulary rather than poor reading mechanics (Burgoyne et al. 2017).
There may be other types of data presented, such as those arising from The Bell Foundation framework or the CEFR levels. If you are not sure about what is recorded in profiles at your school, it is really important to ask the experts who set the assessments what the data might mean.

Student voice

Short descriptions in the profiles of a student’s strengths and areas for improvement can give us a range of academic and affective insights, including emotional wellbeing.

In my experience, these sections of a profile are most usefully filled in by the student first, allowing them to write or type without help, providing that their proficiency level allows them a certain independence.

Hopefully this section of the final profile will therefore include a student’s own, uncorrected words entered on regular occasions so that progress can be seen. Allowing imperfect paragraphs to ‘sit there’ can be a great indicator of progress, while teacher comments can be recorded separately.

Active use of profiles to support EAL students

All this suggests that a focus on profile language records before a school year starts can provide invaluable insights for all teachers. If that is so, it follows that at least one CPD session for all staff at the beginning of a school year that concentrates on language can be an effective way of reacquainting ourselves with our students and their needs. Looking at language-related data in profiles can be incredibly helpful in CPD sessions, allowing participating staff to refresh their knowledge or check their assumptions about their students. They can also be a brilliant support during post-lesson observation conversations.

Here are some practical ideas of activities for CPD sessions involving EAL student profiles:

Provide a few known EAL student profiles without the proficiency data scores and ask teachers to fill it in and discuss whether they remember the student’s starting point.
Where a student’s level is visible on the profile ask teachers to design suitable support strategies to enable progress in their subject from these starting points
Provide anonymous self-evaluation paragraphs written by students and ask teachers to identify how they might be supported.
Ask groups to discuss how they plan to check the linguistic understanding of a range of students during a lesson, using AFL techniques.
Share which strategies you have already tried / you would like to try to support students who have different needs.
Discuss a descriptive paragraph written by the student in a profile. Is it a true reflection of the attainment in your subject? Why? Why not?

Outcomes: good for EAL, good for all

The beginning of the school year is, potentially, the time of year when we know our students least well. If every lesson is a language lesson, this data- focused CPD and preparation will concentrate everyone’s planning on language development whether or not their students are EAL learners.