Supporting elementary English

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Our EAL provision in the elementary school this year included supported English lessons for immersion and intermediate level EAL learners in years 1 to 6 on a weekly basis. In practical terms, this meant that about once a week, an EAL teacher would withdraw all EAL learners from New to English to Developing Competence on the Bell Foundation English language proficiency scale to provide differentiated and scaffolded input aligned with the English curriculum.

Whether withdrawal is the best course of action might be debatable; however, we looked at it through a more pragmatic lens and prioritised the opportunities that our timetable afforded us for extra support. We have all learned a lot through this experience for sure. Here is a list of takeaways and evidence that I’ve presented to SLT when planning our EAL support for next year:

  • co-planning is the single most important step to ensure success of any kind of subject specific support. The more involved the EAL team becomes in the planning process, the better supported teachers and learners are across the year groups. This is especially important when staffing is problematic and it’s difficult to provide equitable support to all learners.
  • working with learners in small groups is more impactful. Hardly surprising, I know, but it’s been an important piece of evidence for us when we are redesigning this line of support. You can read more about small group teaching from Anna Leaman here.
  • the younger the learners, the less impactful withdrawal lessons are. Therefore, next year, we aim to push in even more. Sometimes, having a different teacher in a different classroom once a week causes confusion. Whereas having that same teacher in the regular classroom to provide the extra support eases things to a great extent.
  • Consistency is key. I feel like I should make this my motto, I use this phrase so much! But it’s true, keeping to the set objectives and agreed format helps the learners and the teachers too. After an initial planning meeting where the objectives were set for about half a term, we kept in touch regularly in messages, informal chats and emails. This ensure that we were all able to work independently when needed but kept each other informed and up-to-date.

Year 5 English support

This year, I was in charge of the year 5 and 6 English support, which was a great opportunity to work more closely together with my colleagues as well as with the Head of English. Together, we managed to do a lot in a short span of time. One of the more challenging projects was supporting the Year 5 learners in reading and comprehending Kensuke’s Kingdom.

the cover of Michael Morpurgo's novel, Kensuke's Kingdom

After an initial planning session, we agreed that I will primarily focus on comprehension of the text to ensure that the EAL learners are better able to follow along with the rest of the learners during the other English lessons. This meant that I covered about a chapter’s worth of text in each lesson. But as you can imagine, that’s a lot of text to get through even for non-EAL learners, so I needed to find ways to make the text accessible. Here is how I approached this:

  1. Keep to the objectives: As I mentioned, we had planned and agreed to the objectives before I started these sessions. Keeping to these was essential for everyone involved – it made my planning more focused, helped my colleagues and learners too because they were prepared for what they needed to do next. Based on what the learners were expected to do with the text in their English lessons week by week, I carefully selected the parts of the chapters that we focused on for comprehension. For instance, when they had to create a brochure about what to do when somebody falls overboard, we mostly focused on the parts of the text detailing the circumstances of Michael falling into the water. Or when they had to write a biography, we co-created Kensuke’s lifeline together.
  2. Picture Word Inductive Model (PWIM): Adapted from Calhoun (1999), I like using PWIM because it allows me to set the context with the help of an image, check my learners’ prior knowledge of the topic and feed in language they need. Combined with translanguaging, the PWIM is a powerful tool in a teacher’s repertoire. Kensuke’s Kingdom only has a few images but they are all meaningful and relevant to the story. I often started the lessons by analysing the image accompanying the chapters. Sometimes they were simply tools to introduce language, but oftentimes they served as springboards for predictions and inferencing too. You’ll find more information and tips about the PWIM in Pete and my upcoming book, Supporting EAL Learners.
  3. Abridged version a la AI: Since the chapters are long and wordy, I needed to find ways to give my learners an abridged version without losing the essence. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini are getting better at providing short summaries of texts at the approximate CEFR levels requested. Of course, neither of these AI tools could abridge the text chapter by chapter, so I asked for a summary of the novel and used that text as a base when I needed it. Not a perfect solution, but it did save me considerable time.
  4. Use what’s available: Twinkl is often my go-to for EAL-friendly materials for primary aged learners. Their EAL section is brilliant for this age group and it’s growing by the day. Luckily, they have a lot on this particular book, although noting aimed specifically at EAL learners. Even though I had to heavily adapt their materials for my EAL learners, it still saved me lots of time to not have to reinvent the wheel. I got a lot of use out of the materials related to Kensuke’s character in particular – his lifeline, his character description, etc. Another great resource is the 60 Seconds Read Activity Pack, which allowed my learners to engage with excerpts from the text without having to read a lot at once. Of course, we spent way more than 60 seconds on reading!
  5. A bit more help from AI: AI was useful for more than just to summarise the text. When we were reading about Kensuke’s life, my learners wrote questions to ask him, and I prompted Gemini to pretend to be Kensuke and answer their questions. The learners thoroughly enjoyed this, especially when Kensuke “spoke” to them! Since Gemini didn’t get every detail right, their challenge was to then read the chapter and identify the “lies”. They were engaged and interested, and it gave them a real reason to read. We all had fun!

The plan for next year is to work even more closely at the planning stage and to mostly support our learners in their English classrooms rather than to withdraw them. This is definitely one aspect of the job that I’ve been missing. I enjoy co-planning and co-teaching and I’m looking forward to spending more time in subject lessons once again!

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