EAL - Teaching and Learning Strategy: 4

Participation is vital. Don’t hesitate to ask the EAL students in your lessons to answer questions, read aloud, become actively involved in pair work and group tasks, etc. This is an important part of their language acquisition.

Shpresa

At our school, where 35% of our students speak English as an additional language, we value and celebrate the numerous first languages that are spoken at the school. We believe that this approach sends a powerful and positive message to students about their identity. One of these languages is Albanian.

Research proves that bilingual and multilingual students’ academic performance, as well as their cognitive and linguistic development, improves when they are actively encouraged to use their first languages on a regular basis. In brief, frequently using both their first language and English will increase students' chances of exam success. This is known as Balanced Bilingualism.

We have therefore organised for an outside agency - Shpresa Programme - to work with our Albanian-speaking students. Shpresa is a user-led organisation that promotes the participation and contribution of the Albanian-speaking community in the UK. It enables its users to play a positive and active role in society.

After discussions with our students, a representative from Shpresa has been delivering a weekly photography course which uses a mixture of both English and Albanian. The course is proving to be popular and successful and even included a recent weekend trip to the National Portrait Gallery. It will culminate in a display of the students' photographs; photographs that will focus on various aspects of Albanian and Kosovan culture.

 

EAL - Teaching and Learning Strategy: 3

In order to ensure that EAL students have understood your instructions and are therefore able to attempt tasks, it is useful to ask them to repeat the instructions, using the language that they know.

EAL - Teaching and Learning Strategy: 2

We encourage students who speak English as an additional language to always have their bilingual dictionaries on their desks at the beginning of every lesson. It is very important that students who speak EAL use every tool at their disposal to assist with comprehensible input and output. Language and language learning are about vocabulary, about words. For students who are new to the English language and therefore have problems with comprehension, looking up a word in the dictionary is often the best place to start. It can help them to understand you and it can help you to understand them.

EAL - Teaching and Learning Strategy: 1

We encourage all teaching staff to differentiate their Power Points in the same ways; more specifically by highlighting instructions in blue and key words/complex vocabulary in green. These words can be translated in advance for students who are beginners in English and given to them at the beginning of the lesson in order to help with comprehension. The vocabulary could also be provided with pictures in order to help students who require some visual input. Alternatively, teachers could provide students with the key words in English those who are able to use their bilingual dictionaries to translate them by themselves. It is also useful to provide students with sentence starters and prompts because one common problem among EAL students is knowing how to begin formulating their written answers.