According to a recent report by the Department of Education, Working lives of teachers and leaders, early career teachers reported that they felt least prepared to teach in multilingual classrooms compared to all other training areas. Only 43% reported that they felt their training prepared them well for teaching in multilingual environments.
This is a concerning figure as 21.4% of pupils in England today are multilingual learners who use English as an Additional Language (EAL). This figure jumps to 30.2% of nursery children, confirming that multilingualism is a growing and permanent feature of our classrooms.
In support, this article offers five top EAL tips for early career teachers as they embrace multilingualism and seek to employ distinctive EAL approaches that can support learners who are at the early stages of developing English.
1. Make use of available EAL resources and expertise in your school
Supporting multilingual learners who use EAL is a whole school effort and, as such, your school may already have EAL resources and provision in place. What this looks like may vary from school to school, yet most likely, there will be someone in your school that has a designated EAL role.
This person may be an EAL coordinator, the head of your department, or the inclusion lead. In some instances, the SENDCo may be assigned an EAL role, even though learning an additional language is not a SEND need. Additionally, your ECT mentor may be able to provide you with information on EAL pedagogy and provision. Once you’ve identified key staff, consider asking the following questions as you seek to learn more:
- Does my school have an EAL policy or language policy?
- Does my school have an induction procedure for newly arrived multilingual learners and families?
- Does my school create pupil profiles for newly arrived multilingual learners?
- Does my school have shared curriculum resources that have been adapted for learners at different levels of English language proficiency?
- Does my school have a system for sharing EAL information and advice?
- Is there a teacher that I can observe or talk to who is an expert in working with multilingual learners who use EAL?
- Is there continuing professional learning around EAL that I can access or attend?
2. Consider EAL as part of your ECT induction
Your induction programme, as an early career teacher, is based on the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF). As you work through induction materials with your mentor, consider your multilingual learners, especially those learners who are at the early stages of developing English. Refrain from thinking about EAL as a separate topic or a bolt-on training. Instead, consider EAL in relation to all aspects of the ITTECF.
For example:
Adaptive Teaching (Standard Five)
You might want to ask:
- How can I best adapt lessons for learners who are at different levels of English language proficiency in my class?
Assessment (Standard 6)
You might want to ask:
- How can I best plan formative assessment tasks so that learners who are new to English can demonstrate their understanding?
Learners who are new to English may understand the curriculum content but may not yet be able to demonstrate this knowledge in English, especially if the assessment task requires extended use of language.
Answers to these types of questions and many more can be found within The Bell Foundation’s ECT and EAL self-study MOOC. This freely available online course aligns with the ITTECF and provides self-paced materials for both early career teachers and for ECT mentors.
3. Draw upon your learners’ cultural and linguistic resources
Multilingual learners bring a wealth of experience and linguistic resources to the classroom that you will want to draw upon as a foundation for further learning. This includes knowledge and skills in their home language and other languages they may know. They will also have home and life experiences that have helped shape their identities, knowledge, cultural practices, and perspectives.
These valuable resources should not be kept outside the school door. Allowing learners to use their full linguistic repertoire (all the language/s they know) as a resource for learning can maximise their abilities to comprehend, make meaning, communicate, and acquire new subject-matter knowledge (Duarte, 2019).
You can leverage your learner’s linguistic resources by simply pairing students who share a common home language, allowing learners to take notes or label diagrams in their home language or plan a piece of writing in their home language prior to writing it in English. Use bilingual books and dictionaries and online translation apps as available.
When learners recognise their linguistic and cultural identities in school, they feel respected as important members and contributors to their learning environment. You can watch Miriam, a Year 3 teacher, provide an example of what this can look like in practice.
4. Identify instructional strategies that can support language learning within your curriculum
Unlike pupils whose first language is English, those pupils learning English as an additional language have a double task at school – simultaneously learning English while also learning subject content in English. This means teachers will need to provide language support and instruction so learners using EAL can access the curriculum.
The Bell Foundation offers over twenty Great Ideas which include strategies you can use to integrate English language development and classroom curriculum. Some of these include:
Likewise, you can find adapted teaching resources that provide examples of how the Great Idea strategies can be incorporated into curriculum. These are categorised by phase, topic and English language proficiency level. Explore one or two of these ideas and try them out in your own classroom.
5. Build your own language awareness
One of the hallmarks of an effective learning environment for pupils using EAL is to have teachers who understand the language demands of their own content areas and how language is used in their subject/s (Gibbons, 2008).
Nearly everything that happens in school takes place through language. As an early career teacher, start to become more aware of and interested in the language associated with the content of your lessons. Plan for the language you might want to highlight, model, investigate, and explicitly teach during lessons.
Likewise, pay attention to the language your learners produce. How might you expand their language use or modify your own language for a learner who is new to English? Developing an awareness of language takes time but there are some broad areas of continued professional learning that you might want to pursue;
- Vocabulary development
- Disciplinary literacy
- Oracy
- Multilingualism
- EAL
Finally, the National Subject Association for EAL (NALDIC) has a special interest group specifically designed for beginner and early career teachers. Joining such a group can provide you with ongoing support and a community of teachers who share a common interest in multilingual learners and EAL.