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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.
Home is the first learning environment for children and particularly for children who learn through EAL, home can be a powerful learning environment filled with opportunities for language development. Multilingual families often wonder how they can help their children improve English at home or maintain their home language(s) and the answer to this is: use resources that you already have around you.
An additional adult can be very effective in supporting teachers with EAL learners in the classroom. An additional adult may be a teaching assistant, learning support assistant or just a regular volunteer. They can significantly enhance support for learner motivation, confidence and self-esteem (Wilson et al, 2003). If you are a classroom teacher, you may be observed on how best to deploy your additional adults against your school standards.
As school teachers faced with EAL learners in our classrooms, we often push the teaching of phonics down the list, especially at secondary school level. Yet communication is dependent on comprehensive pronunciation when speaking, and on decoding graphemes when reading. Consider for a moment the impact mispronunciation can have on accurate communication. For example, if I ask for soap in a restaurant, I might be faced with a blank stare! This error is caused by confusing two very similar phonemes in soap/soup.