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The language show this year in Olympia made me even more aware of the gift of having more than one language. One of the stand's motto was 'monolingualism can be cured', another 'Speak to the Future' (www.speaktothefuture.org) campaigns to promote the teaching of languages in schools in the UK. Since this September all children in primary schools will be taught a language as the government finally realised that, in a mobile world, a second language is essential for a country's economic development.
The multiple materials available for teaching, the effort and expense involved in learning a foreign language is challenging compared to the facility with which a child learns a language naturally and effortlessly in their home environment. I always remember a beginner adult student in Paris struggling to learn English who told me sadly that his mother was English and he wished she had spoken to him in English so that he wouldn't need to learn it now. When growing up my parents always told me that all languages are useful, I didn't realise how right they were. Sadly, some languages are viewed by the speaker or listener with lower prestige and this can affect the both the listener's and the speaker's motivation to use it.
As Professor Jim Cummins said, (This Place Nurtures My Spirit - Creating Contexts of Empowerment in www.iteachilearn.org/cummins/spirit.html), to reject a child's language is to reject the child' and to respect a child's culture and language is to respect 'who they are and where they come from'. Culture and language are an important part of one's identity, respecting them are the key to a child's confidence and success. Language is how emotions are expressed, there are words and expressions in all languages that loose their emotiveness and true meaning. It is important that all languages and cultures are valued and given equal status.
How to value a child's language at school:
Think back to when you, as a learner, learnt a foreign language, how did it feel? Have you visited a country when you didn't understand the language, what did it feel like when you didn't understand what people were saying? Immerse your students in a new language for a few moments, discuss how it felt. This would help students understand how it feels for a new EAL student. By showing an appreciation of who they are is an acceptance of who they are and is the key to motivation. The key to the success of an EAL student is through the key to their heart, only when you have found the key will they blossom to their full academic potential. It is not how smart the students are or how academic the teaching is but how valued they feel. In this age of constant appraisals this should be taken on board, as one head of EAL stated she stipulated the EAL lessons should be appraised in a different way due to their different nature.
Brewster, Ellis and Girard (2012) discuss the idea of playing Bingo or Dominoes as games for connecting various curriculum areas. Brewster (2012) explains that playing games like these can be a support for learning target vocabulary, for example, playing a Dominoes game before or after reading where learners can either match the words or the pictures together as they listen is an excellent way to learn the target language. You may be studying the human skeleton vocabulary in the game and making connections to the class book e.g.
The Sentence Analyser was piloted by the children and staff in the EAL Hub at Lea Forest Academy in the autumn term of 2018. Over the following two terms, the children and staff used it in a variety of ways to support a widening of the children's vocabulary. The EAL Hub children's morphology skills were tracked, alongside a control group.
What did the data show? What did the staff think? Was the resource beneficial enough to become embedded? Let's find out!
Lea Forest, my school in Birmingham, has been using the Learning Village for over three years. It has proved a highly effective learning and teaching resource, with the children making strong progress. The Learning Village asked us to pilot its newest feature: the Sentence Analyser!
We were seeking a resource that would help us teach the average 75,000 words needed for the children’s language to flourish and to deepen their morphology skills. We thought the Sentence Analyser may be a useful resource.