As a Head of Early Years in an international school following the EYFS and IPC curriculums it has always been important to ensure that the teaching of the English language is done in the classroom without the help of specialist EAL support. Early years teachers are great physical, visual talkers!
One of the key principles of teaching in the Early Years is that bilingualism has an advantage and that as the first language it has a continuing and significant role in identity, learning and the acquisition of additional languages.
In the Early Years Department of our school, 90% of new students to FS1 and their parents are EAL in the same home language (Arabic) and are taught by a majority of overseas hired teachers who have no prior experience of this home language.
In FS1, where we accommodate children between the ages of 3 and 4 years, it is very important that we acknowledge their home language not just pay lip service to it. We do this by providing bilingual teaching assistant support and encouraging parents to continue to use their home language especially during bedtime stories and everyday life experiences. These children are still in the early stages of cognitive and academic development. Language acquisition goes hand in hand with this development, building on the skills and experiences they encounter within the setting.
The home language should be valued and we do this quite successfully at our school by having Arabic taught in the early years’ classroom as opposed to moving to an Arabic only classroom. Having displays of children’s activities and photos of them working in Arabic lessons displayed prominently in the class and encouraging the Arabic teachers to use a similar form of early years pedagogy has had a very positive impact on children’s English language acquisition. The children see daily the interactions between the English and Arabic teachers; the rapport, respect and camaraderie for each other. The use of our Early Years topics to inform Arabic planning enables children to make connections with their learning. Also using similar approaches to synthetic phonics in both languages and displayed alongside each other. This shows our EAL children that we value them, their culture and their community; the results of which are that children in foundation stage at our school grasp English more confidently and securely and at a quicker pace.
Tools to support this development:
If you are interested in working at an international school check out Teacher Horizons - a site full of helpful information!
Learners with speech and language difficulties may find it difficult to use the correct tense or find it hard to understand the concepts of time.
Tip or Idea: Take 5 minutes to chat together at the end of a busy day or lesson. Talk about what you did, what you enjoyed or what made you laugh. This gives learners the opportunity to practise using the past tense and maybe time and order words too like first, next and then.
Learners having difficulty with receptive language or following directions may need support with learning propositions.
Tip or Idea: Ask your learner to draw or make an imaginary scene by following instructions e.g. Draw a house at the bottom of your page/Draw a sunshine above the house/Draw a tree next to the house. Extend this further: Can your learner tell you what to draw? Can they make a crazy or funny picture? Can they make a scene with physical objects?
A School Language Profile is an invaluable tool!
In the previous article we looked at the thorny issue of EAL learners with specific learning differences (SpLD). We discussed how identification of SpLD in EAL learners could be a long and frustrating process. We looked at some possible, non-language based assessments. At the end of the article we discussed the possibility of using a ‘language profile’ to help identify possible concerns at an early stage.
