EAL

Intent

At Rolls Crescent, our school community includes many children with English as an Additional Language - 68% at the last count. We have pupils with more than 40 different home languages, and even more dialects.

As a school, we value the diversity of cultures and heritage of our children and recognise the need to offer a curriculum suited to all.

We have a continuum of English acquisition; from our EAL children who were born in the UK and have received all of their education in an English-speaking environment, to others who are International New Arrivals with no experience of English (or of formal education).

Pupils with EAL potentially face difficulties throughout their academic life. Without acquiring and mastering spoken and written English, many will face barriers to learning, accessing the curriculum and reaching their full potential. (Research suggests that those new to English will acquire conversational fluency within two years, but will need five years or longer to achieve competence in academic language.*)

With all this in mind, it is vital that children arriving at Rolls with EAL are made to feel welcome and valued, and that as a school we use all available resources to support them to learn English as quickly as possible, whilst also acknowledging and encouraging the development of their home languages.

In order to achieve this, as part of the admissions process, we aim to build a picture of the child’s background, experiences of language and abilities.

This information will help to identify the needs of the child. Initially, many children will require differentiated planning to access the curriculum, but wherever possible, they should be encouraged to work alongside their peers. Co-operative learning using the Kagan structures, talk partners etc will not only develop the child’s awareness of the spoken language, but also their feeling of inclusion.

In some cases, support staff will play an essential role as it will be necessary for an EAL child to have access to early phonics.

Where a pupil is assessed as having little to no English, support should be provided in the form of induction interventions. These should focus on practical, everyday language. Ideally, these sessions should be short, daily interventions.

Such upfront, intensive intervention will reduce the time before in-class support and small group work is sufficient to successfully integrate the child into the classroom environment.

Only by minimising the barriers faced by our EAL pupils, we will help them to achieve their full potential.

*Professor J Cummins (one of world’s leading experts on bilingualism and second language acquisition).