Using children’s home languages in English medium classrooms is widely agreed to be good practice. But how can teachers with classes with lots of different home languages make this a reality for all children? Josh Martin and Mindy McCracken of …
Category: Practice
Supporting unaccompanied asylum seeker children: eLearning for social workers, schools and foster carers
Jane Townsend has worked with asylum seeker children and their families in Gloucester for many years. In this post she describes an initiative that she set up with the county council to help social workers, schools and foster carers understand …
Knowing Your Genres – Helping EAL learners to identify text types and features
Manny Vazquez is an EAL consultant and language specialist at Hounslow Language Service. In this post he describes how he worked with Year 11 students to adapt a new teaching resource and in so doing helped them to reinforce their …
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Community Engagement: Supporting Turkish Pupils and their Families
Earlier this school year when Emily Gazzard, Inclusion Manager at a large primary school in North London, found that some of the school’s EAL learners were not doing as well as hoped, she and her colleagues worked with parents to set up …
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What’s in a RIG?
Dianne Excell is the national coordinator for NALDIC’s regional interest groups. In this post, she tells us why they’re important and what you can expect if you come to one. She also introduces the first of her in-depth reports …
Bilingual EAL Library
Hamish Chalmers is a regular contributor on the use of first languages in the classroom. In this piece, he introduces an account by Kay Robinson, EAL Specialist at East Oxford Primary School, describing her success in developing a bilingual library …
Literacy for Achievement
This short post is a call for action! There’s a fantastic CPD programme being developed with major funding behind it – the sort of thing we’ve been crying out for. They’re short a few participants, though, so please do read on and …
ResearchED Language – conference report
There are a lot of teacher-research events happening this week, and we’ll be writing every day to share the findings and resources with you. First is Kamil Trzebiatowski, reporting from this weekend’s ResearchED Language conference in Oxford. Watch this space …
Creative ESOL for EAL
ReWrite is a London-based charity that aims to break down barriers of prejudice and racism through drama and creative writing. This post, by Farha Bi, builds on her experience of running Creative ESOL with EAL pupils in London schools. Rewrite has been working …
Working with the new EAL ‘stages’
Kamil Trzebiatowski is an EAL Coordinator in Hull. In this guest post, he writes about his experiences of trying to adapt his school’s EAL assessment to the new EAL stages of proficiency.
EAL Journal 