TR&W Issue 20

62 | www.teachwire.net despite being provided with spelling support, keyword mats with visuals, and sentence starters. Common writing challenges for EAL learners When learning to write, multilingual learners often face various difficulties that might have linguistic or cultural roots. To begin with, compared to other languages, English spelling is complex. Focusing on teaching spelling rules and eliminating careless errors as early as possible in a child’s school career will help improve the quality and fluency of their writing. EAL learners have very limited vocabulary at first and, naturally, their sentences might sound repetitive and too simple. Due to the lack of acquired vocabulary, they struggle H ave you ever had to write a poem using rhyming words; or a story with a clear beginning, middle and end using powerful adjectives? Or an essay using similes and alliteration? What if you had to do it in a foreign language? What would you struggle with? What would help you express your thoughts? On many occasions in my practice as an EAL specialist, I have realised that developing and improving writing skills for EAL learners in a school context is often the least popular and the most difficult language skill to become proficient in. Yet it is so crucial. In our teaching practice, we consistently see that mastering successful writing skills in more than one language can boost confidence, creativity and communication skills, lead to improved language acquisition, and improve a learner’s chances of success both academically and later in life. Mastering writing can bring challenges for teachers and EAL learners alike in the classroom, though. Some of my multilingual learners took a month before they felt confident enough to write a paragraph of five simple sentences on the popular topic of ‘superheroes’. This to express themselves or find the appropriate words, e.g. ‘there is no place in the hall’ instead of ‘there is no room in the hall’. Grammatical structures including word order, tenses, prepositions or subject-verb agreement might also differ significantly from the learners’ home language. There can also be discrepancies between English and the home language in what is expected with regard to content and layout when writing essays, non-chronological reports and newspaper articles. This can lead to incoherent paragraphs and disjointed ideas, with incorrect transition words. How many of us actually double-check that the EAL learners in our classroom have understood the writing task and the prompts? These learners can struggle to fully comprehend what is expected of them and might write off-topic due to unfamiliar and subject-specific vocabulary in the written instructions. Multilingual learners will also often need longer to plan, draft and edit their writing compared to native speakers as they try to use the whole of their language repertoire to navigate a written task successfully. Luckily, there are several scaffolding strategies that can be used to effectively support the different stages of EAL learners’ writing development. Pre-writing strategies When introducing a new genre of writing, draw on children’s prior learning, and discuss the similarities and differences between this and other styles and genres with which they’re already familiar. Pre-teach spelling patterns and the meaning of unfamiliar keywords explicitly, WRITERS Building new Carefully chosen scaffolding strategies can bring writing success for EAL and multilingual learners, says Iva Miteva “Provide writing frames such as substitution tables” Pronoun Verb Article Noun Adverb I touched the door gently. He opened window quickly. She closed book slowly. We moved chair quietly. They table noisily. Table 1. An example of a simple substitution table