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Academia Británica Cuscatleca (ABC) in El Salvador joined the Learning Village in April 2015. However, they weren't fully active across Upper Primary until Communication Across Cultures came to their school in February this year to give an inset on EAL.
Since then, they have used the Learning Village to support learners with accessing some of the basics of English as well as the curriculum content needed to help them to be successful in their lessons.
Although we can't put names to these results, you can see a snapshot of the top learner's progress over the last 30 days, here:

The Head of Village and EAL Coordinator at ABC, Jonathan Marquez, works in small groups with his learners to pre-teach and gap fill the necessary English language required for learners based on what is currently happening or about to happen in the curriculum and the weekly learner progress report he receives from the Learning village.
ABC is fast approaching the top scores on the Learning Village leaderboard!
Thanks for sharing these photos ABC and keep up the good work!

With thanks to Academia Británica Cuscatleca the children and their parents for providing permission to publish these photos.
Stories are a powerful way for children to develop language skills and connect with their culture. Specifically, for EAL families, storytelling in their home language is a way to preserve cultural traditions and is an essential part of their children’s multilingual development.
As educational pedagogies continue to move cyclically, with new strategies moving in and out of favour, the battle of reading approaches continues to rage on between the 3 main approaches: Synthetic Phonics, Analytical Phonics and Whole Language methods. They are often viewed on a continuum, with the Whole Language approach (Top Down method) being the least skills based and the Synthetic Phonics approach (Bottom Up method) being the most (see figure 1).
Many of us have learnt to spell as a child without being specifically taught the sounds. In the past, the teaching of phonics was discouraged in schools, however, we learnt a lot through sounding out words independently. At a recent course on voice production, the importance of vowel sounds was emphasised as central to pronunciation. They were also emphasised as central to sounding out to help with spelling. Chunking (breaking up words into syllables) also helps to sound out and spell longer more challenging words.