EAL - A follow up!

Our previous EAL post, mostly due to the superb examples from Ryan, has proven very popular and as result the viewing figures have triggered a follow up post with some excellent advice from Julie Poole. Let's remind ourselves of the facts first of all:

Julie writes:

At first bilingual children need to understand their new language environment and become familiar with the sounds, rhythms and patterns of English. They do this by watching and listening and then internalising and processing what they have observed. This is sometimes called the silent period. During this time children may take part in classroom activities and communicate by non-verbal means. This processing may take up to 6 months.

It takes about two years to gain near native proficiency in social English. It takes 5 to 7 years to gain near native proficiency in academic English. It is then advised that they follow these steps:

1. Echoing

First attempts will be echoing words or phrases they hear around them. This is one reason why EAL students are placed in higher sets so that they have good models of English.

2. Formula Phrasing

Children will begin to use words, phrases or short sentences for use in a variety of social and classroom situations.

3. Functional Vocabulary

Their repertoire of names and things will be extended. They will also start to use these words to perform different language functions e.g. “Book” may mean “where is my book” or “I have a book,” depending on the context.

4. Basic Sentence Construction 

Children will begin to put together their own sentences of two or three words, usually involving a verb with a subject and/or object.

5. Extended Sentence Construction

Basic sentence construction will be extended through word substitution or the addition of adjectives, prepositional phrases, pronouns and clauses. There will inevitably be errors in the use of plurals, tenses and pronouns, depending upon the structure of the first language.

Once familiarised with the essential info, you may be asking yourselves 'How can we support said students'? Firstly, please see our previous post and the excellent examples shared by Ryan. If you wish to examine other examples of EAL resources used in school, check out the EAL folder on the Shared Resources drive: \\MAN-FILE-001\MAN-TeacherResources$\EAL\Teaching Resources

Within the folder are both practical strategies and worked examples.

In addition, you will hopefully have noted the EMAS shortcut which has recently been re-added to your desktop. EMAS (https://www.emasuk.com/) is a bilignugual EAL resource library, which we at Mangotsfield School have access to. A gentle reminder that the log in details for this are:

Username: mangotsfield

Password: Bristol169

Accessing the Talking Tools

1) Load our website address www.emasuk.com into Google Chrome.

2) Click on the Resources login at the top of the page

3) Enter the above username and password

Please note your password is cAsE Sensitive and must be entered exactly as above.

For any further support, please do contact Julie Poole.