Teach Primary Issue 18.7

F EATURE E A L Bilingualism in the CLASSROOM Ed Finch and Dr Eowyn Crisfield discuss the importance of identity when supporting EAL pupils “The ‘EAL’ label tells us nothing useful about the pupil in front of us” I n a recent episode of the Primary Futures podcast, we had a wide-ranging conversation about bilingual education ( hamilton-trust. org.uk/primary-futures- podcast ). It’s a wider issue than busy teachers might have thought, so what we can do to help our young learners and their families? A sense of self Language is so key to our sense of self that a child who doesn’t feel seen, or who is struggling to communicate, will struggle to learn and may end up displaying difficult behaviours. The ‘EAL’ label tells us nothing useful about the pupil in front of us, it just says that someone in their family home has an additional language. The pupil labelled EAL in the class list could have grown up in a fully English- speaking environment, or be new to the country with parents who have no English at all. We must be curious about the pupils in our care and find out what ‘EAL’ means for them and their learning. In these circumstances, every adult in the school is a teacher of English: pre-teaching vocabulary, modelling structures, providing a receptive listening ear and bringing their gift of comprehension to the learner’s gift of expression. The lunchtime supervisor must be just as on board as the class teacher. Valuing home languages You can make your classroom much more welcoming by learning a few words of each child’s home language and taking care to pronounce pupils’ names correctly. Perhaps you could you invite in to their new environment, attempt to cover up their home language, but experts tell us that schools should encourage families to continue to use their heritage language. You can support parents by telling them this, so that they don’t struggle needlessly at home. Tracking development With no statutory training or framework for EAL, teachers can be left to fall back on their own experience of language freely available online, such as the tool developed by the Bell Foundation, which tracks learners’ progress from absolute beginner, through basic functional competence and onto the academic fluency that takes five to eight years to develop. We recommend more specific resources on the podcast – do give it a listen. Confident, empowered learners Ultimately, our job isn’t to turn pupils into native speakers – it’s about making them confident communicators. Let’s stop thinking of the EAL child as somehow in deficit; after all, bilingual people do better at university and tend to earn more in their careers. We should want for our EAL children just what we’d want for every other pupil – an environment where every child that comes through the door has the opportunity to thrive in a curriculum that meets their needs. TP Ed Finch is a teacher and headteacher with over twenty years’ experience. He is the host of the Primary Futures podcast from Hamiton Brookes. hamilton-trust.org.uk/primary-futures-podcast parents in too, to share language as a celebration of culture and diversity? A display of all the heritage languages represented in class, will also help everyone feel included. Are you a language learner yourself? If so, you can model getting something wrong in your target language and trying again. In this way, the children will learn it’s ok for them to make mistakes. Some pupils, trying to fit learning, or on staffroom folk wisdom. However, many of the factoids out there just aren’t true. Children don’t learn languages more ‘naturally’ than adults, nor can they simply ‘catch up’ and become fluent in just a few months. Schools need a nuanced understanding of pupils' language development. There are many excellent resources Dr Eowyn Crisfield is a specialist in bilingualism, bilingualism in education, and teacher-training. www.teachwire.net | 21