Further learning - Blog

It's now almost exactly a year since the UK education system went into lockdown. The ruling that schools must close to almost all pupils was a shock to teachers, pupils, parents and everyone involved in the education system - and the repercussions of the immediate crisis continue to ripple through our lives.

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!

Marking and feedback is a crucial part of any teacher’s workload, and is essential for EAL learners. The importance of good-quality marking and feedback has been evidenced by many academic professionals, notably William & Black (1998) and, more recently, William (2018) and Hattie (2012). Hattie discusses the idea of rigorous approaches to marking and feedback, stating that through assessing learners, teachers themselves learn about their own impact: “As a professional, it is critical to know they impact.

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.