Every lesson in the classroom needs to begin with clear learning intentions or goals. These goals clarify what success looks like. They are usually linked to our teaching and learning activities and students demonstrate their new insights by fulfilling the learning objectives or purposes. These goals usually begin with phrases such as “At the end of the lesson, students will be able to/demonstrate/write and so on.” However, let’s take a step back and think about what this should look like in an EAL classroom.

It is crucial we begin with the mindset that in an EAL classroom, we are teaching SKILLS, not TEXTS. So, what would our learning intentions reflect? 

How do clear EAL learning goals help?

Clear and explicit lesson goals or intentions allow EAL students various opportunities to demonstrate their learning and experience success in the classroom. They also support retention of new skills and create a balance between safety and accountability during learning.

Teachers presenting explicit EAL learning intentions are able to gather substantial evidence about their students’ progress. This allows us to plan the focus of our next lesson and enable our EAL students to advance according to their individual needs and abilities. On top of that, we are providing ongoing mini formative assessments in our daily lessons. Most importantly, we are creating an equitable and inclusive environment in our classrooms.

The next time we are planning our EAL lessons, let’s be mindful that our learning intentions reflect all the criteria we have discussed here. Every child deserves an education and every EAL student deserves to progress at their own pace.

According to the Australian Psychological Society (APS), trauma stems from highly frightening or distressing events. It is labeled as a psychological wound or injury. The effects can be lifelong and seemingly ordinary events and images can trigger a response. The trigger takes the person back to the time and place when the trauma occurred. It seems like the brain does not know that the trauma happened in the past, it is as if the trauma is happening in the present moment. 

Children and young people who have experienced trauma may seem like they are “normal” and “doing okay” in their new learning environments. They are often categorised under behaviour management issues when in reality, they are acting out as a means of coping with their emotional triggers. They may not be able to verbalise or explain their pain. The expressions of their inner demons may look like punching a wall, shouting or screaming at their peers and teachers, violently pushing an adult away, crying uncontrollably, and so on. 

Teachers are not trained psychologists and therefore should not be expected to know what to do when these breakdowns happen. School leadership needs to have a focus on trauma strategies especially if they have a large cohort of refugees. Trauma is now recognised as an inter-generational issue, so even when the new generation of children are born in the new country, they can still carry the trauma of their families within them. Schools need to work hand-in-hand with trained psychologists who can support teachers to set up classroom boundaries and plans to help students with trauma. 

As trauma can be ongoing and potentially a lifelong struggle, the support from governments, schools, and local communities also need to be a continuous process. Teachers need to have trauma awareness training so they can identify students displaying trauma related behaviour and seek help from third party providers. If schools and communities work together, there is a possibility that children with trauma get detected for early intervention and get the help and support they deserve in order to have some normalcy in their lives after having lost everything that is familiar and precious due to no fault of their own. 

The 1990s movement for teaching English through communicative approaches shifted the focus from rote learning and daily drilling to thinking about language acquisition. Linguists began to investigate how learners could use their language skills to communicate more naturally rather than mechanically repeating chunks of memorised speech patterns. Rote learning created decontextualized learning that learners had difficulty applying to real life situations outside the classroom. Krashen (1980), hypothesised that new language learners are able to naturally “acquire” languages through continuous interactions and exposures to the target language. 

So what does this mean for our newly arrived EAL students? Do we begin with focussing on communication rather than the forms of the English language. Let’s dig a little deeper into this idea of language acquisition.

We can look at language acquisition through the five criteria of age, environment, time limits, access to models, motivation, and input. From the table above, we can see that first language acquisition happens between the ages of 0 to 5 in a familiar and predictable environment. There is very little demand on time and effort and we often adopt the mindset of “every child learns at its own pace”. On top of that, there is access to numerous adults or models with clear relationships. At this age intrinsic motivation is at its all high as all communication is to fulfil personal needs. The adults around the learner adjust their talk to encourage learning. For example, if a child says, “Yesterday, I eat apple”, the adult would most likely repeat, “Oh that’s nice, you ate an apple yesterday”. We don’t directly correct the learner. Let’s compare that to a second or additional language learner:

• Acquisition happens at any age – most of our newly arrived refugee students are older than five but are acquiring their additional language for the first time. 
• They are in unfamiliar and unpredictable territory – scary for anyone at any age.
• We put very high demands on their time – in Australia, they are given a limited amount of time from their date of arrival to moving into a mainstream classroom. This can vary between 12 to 24 months depending on the state they are in. They spend this time in language centres and schools scrambling to get from zero to some English before they are expected to put in extra effort and perform alongside first language Australian students. These students are expected to sit for culturally exclusive national exams although multiple research shows that it takes many years for a new learner to reach native speaker levels. In some countries, refugee and migrant learners are immediately placed into mainstream classrooms and expected to learn the new language.
• They don’t have access to many models. Often, their families are also new to English. Therefore, their only models may be teachers and peers with whom they may have unclear and sometimes difficult relationships.
• There is a lot of outside pressure and comparison to more proficient learners. This can be detrimental to the learners’ motivation to continue learning a language in the language they are learning.
• We may not adjust our talk to make it more comprehensible to the learner.

Finally, it may be crucial for us to consider that most of us learn a new language out of a personal choice but most of our EAL students are forced to learn an additional language although they may already be multilingual due to situations that they could not control. Knowing the difference between language acquisition and language learning may help us determine what we are presenting to our students.

Edited by Quanita Nathan

Learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL) are learning a language in the language they are learning. This means they are learning the behaviour and expectations of the target language in a language that they have yet to connect with. Nothing really makes sense in the beginning. Let’s take a look at what learning to read in a new language actually means to our EAL students.

First of all, reading for the EAL learner involves transferring skills from the first language. For this to happen, we are assuming that they can read in their first language. If that is not the case, the hooks needed to hang the new language on do not exist. Therefore, the transfer cannot happen and they are now acquiring the new language, much like how all children acquire languages from the ages of zero to five.

On top of that, the EAL learner needs to get acquainted with new or unfamiliar language conventions such as:

• set of sounds and sound groupings which may differ from their first language.
• intonation patterns and their meanings
• patterns of stress and pause
• sets of culturally-specific knowledge, values and behaviours
• grammar structure e.g., different word order in sentences
• reading from left to right la

In order for our EAL students to experience success in reading, we need to reflect on the reading materials that we choose. This is not an easy task as we not only need to meet the reading abilities of our students, we also need to consider age-appropriate materials so they engage and actively participate in our reading programmes.

We can begin with choosing reading materials with good visual cues that reflect the experiences, knowledge and interests of the learners. This can help to enable our EAL students to relate and access the stories more easily.

“Good pictures are as close to universal language as the world is likely to get…picture books are an invaluable aid to communication across linguistic lines”, (Reid, 2002, p. 35).

We can also use bilingual books, big books, stories with lots of repetition, class made books based on class experiences, and reading schemes with thematic interests. The key is to connect with the knowledge and experiences that our students already bring into our classrooms.

Furthermore, we need to continuously involve the EAL learner in a number of context-focussed reading experiences every day. These can include exposure to meaningful print in the immediate environment such as signs, charts, and labels around the classroom and school.

In order make reading a more meaningful experience, we need to model and deconstruct a range of texts to help our students develop their understanding of the organisation and language features of different genres. This can include taped reading from online resources, getting the better readers to tape themselves, or record ourselves and other teachers at the school. This will allow EAL students to hear some of the conventions of reading such as pauses, stops, intonations, and stresses. We can also use cloze activities to focus on comprehension or other aspects of language. Finally, wordless picture books have a whole lot of benefits for EAL learners but we will cover that in another blog.

Reference

Reid, S. (2002). Book bridges for ESL students: Using young adult and children’s literature to teach ESL. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

I live and work in Melbourne. We are going into a snap lockdown for the fifth time in 2021. The announcement came later in the day, way after the end of the school day, and after a lot of speculations and wonderings. Without the official press conference release, we could not prepare our students and staff to be ready for online learning. After all, this is our first week of the term.

But as always, the teachers have taken this in their stride and have immediately put plans into action to continue their support for their students. Somehow, many parents and definitely the politicians do not see the stress, the extra time and effort, and mostly the strength of educators in just stepping into and out of the long lockdowns last year and the ongoing circuit breakers since the beginning of this year.

Whenever we publicly share our fears of being forced into the potentially life threatening environments of closed classrooms with no space for social distancing and air flow, we are often accused of being lazy and not wanting to go back into the classrooms. Politicians make decisions about our lives and livelihoods. They lie about schools being safe places. Parents think we do not care about the education of their children. Believe us when we say that we would rather be face-to-face with our students. Online teaching is double the workload and half the satisfaction.

I am a witness and a victim of this constant disrespect towards the noblest of jobs. Teachers are beginning to show signs of fatigue and stress. We are tired and we are are sometimes shocked at how badly we are being treated. We are not in this for the money, we are in this because we care. So please let us do what we know best. And please understand that our lives and the lives of our families matter too.

Life offers many unplanned experiences. We are often persuaded to find the hidden messages behind these events. Maybe even imagine the blessings they may offer. All our lives we hear these chants cheering us on. They come from our parents, families, communities, teachers, and well almost everyone who has taken it upon themselves to nurture our minds and save our souls.

But do these cryptic codes really exist? Is it our life’s mission to go looking for them? Or are we supposed to just live the best we can? Do we have to justify diseases that kill us and agree when the very corporations that may have caused them tell us to eat more healthy foods, drink cleaner water, and breathe better air?

Are we doomed to a meaningless life if we don’t decipher its secrets? In order to find life’s meaning, we have created a scary, angry, and vengeful god. We have instilled fear into the minds of our children so everything they do becomes agreeable to this very powerful being that we created. We put amazing minds into institutes that churn out robots that can further fulfil the needs of those corporations that poison our food and water, pollute our air and shamelessly offer solutions to these problems.

If we sit silently for a moment and really think about life on this planet, we may begin to realise that the hidden is in fact right before our eyes, in plain sight. All we need to do is really look and be unafraid to ignore all the bullshit that is fed to us every single day.

It doesn’t matter…

The colour of my skin

The ethnicity of my ancestors

The battles of my mind

The opinions of naysayers

The lack of neediness

The regrets of the past

The fears of the future

The lies of the world

The aloneness

I AM ENOUGH