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Learners, with or without EAL, may have special educational needs. These needs often require a range of carefully selected strategies and approaches to help learners reach their full potential.
Tip or Idea: Take time to observe your learners, to help distinguish between needs arising from English as an Additional Language (EAL) and those stemming from specific educational needs (SEND). Careful and systematic observation helps teachers to make informed decisions to support learners effectively. This guidance from the Bell Foundation provides a helpful framework.
Learning Village resource: Our range of SEND guides include useful information about different learner needs, as well as adjustments you can make both in the Learning Village and to your teaching practice to support them. Take a look at our summarised Autism guide. Members can access the full set of comprehensive guides here.
In English, there are 44 speech sounds. Creating speech sounds is a more complex process than you might think! It requires the coordination of different muscles and structures. The lips, tongue, teeth and other parts of our mouth all play an important role. Where learners have difficulties creating certain sounds, their fluency, ability to be understood and confidence in speaking aloud can all be affected.
Did you know Learning Village supports a wide range of curriculum topics? This allows you to support your SEND learners within the main class environment by offering scaffolded resources.
Tip or Idea: Pre-teaching curriculum-specific vocabulary before a whole class session can help your SEND learners feel more confident and enable them to access class learning more easily.
Learners with speech and language difficulties may find it difficult to remember words or think or the word they want to use when they are talking.
Tip or Idea: Think of a category such as ‘animals’ or ‘things in a kitchen’ and then see how many words you can name. Each time you think of a word place a Lego piece on top of another and see how tall a tower you can build!