Dr Virginia Rojas: ELL's in the mainstream

Today I was able to attend 2 workshops run by Dr Virginia Rojas; the focus was to consider effective teaching and planning strategies to use with English Language Learners in the mainstream. We have some classes, for English, where EAL learners are taught separtely by the EAL teachers however for the majority of their lessons, our EAL students are taught in the mainstream and are supported by EAL teachers in the classroom. We discussed how important it is for all teachers to be aware of not just the Content or Subject specific learning outcomes but also to consider the Language Learning outcomes. Academic language is complex and abstract and EAL learners need scaffolding if they are to succeed. During the workshop we considered the following 5 principles:

Academic language required for the subject
How to link background knowledg and cultre to the learning
Increasing comprehensible input and language output
Promoting classroom interaction
Stimulating higher order thinking

We then went onto consider the different planning models that are needed for a successful collaboration of planning the content and language learning outcomes, by the 2 teachers - subject teacher and EAL teacher. It is important to create opportunities within the lesson where students can see good models of the academic language in use, be supported by sentence starters / vocabulary bank in order to verbalise their thoughts; they need to be able to construct an oral response using academic language before they are asked to write it down. Differentiation plays a key role in supporting students to become successful and more able to use more demanding and subject specific vocabulary.

Teaching EAL is a pretty complex area due to the nature of bilingualism and language acquisition; students in the same class will be at different stages of acquiring the second language as so much depends on their ability to use their mother tongue academically, their exposure to non-fiction text being just two of the issues. Students I teach in KS3 EAL classes fall into the following 3 categories:

Full time = beginner / elementary / pre-intermediate

Fast track = pre-intermediate / intermediate

Withdrawal = upper intermediate / advanced

In order to support students with acquiring academic language forms we do need to help them to make connections with their mother tongue too; allowing students to see patterns and the similarities and differences of language syntax, lexics and semantics is fundamental.

This workshop has really brought to mind the months of work on my MA dissertation.