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Feedback for EAL Learners: Closing the Covid Catch-up Gap

Feedback for EAL Learners: Closing the Covid Catch-up Gap

Marking and feedback have two main purposes – assessment of learning and assessment for learning With concern around the loss of pupils’ language development due to Covid-19 lockdowns, the need for staff to be teaching as effectively as possible is...
Black Lives Matter: How can schools show this?

Black Lives Matter: How can schools show this?

As teachers we have enormous power to influence pupils’ lives and behaviours, but we can only do this if our own behaviours, values and beliefs work to empower the pupils we are lucky enough to teach. How can teachers empower, rather than dis-empower, their pupils?...
Family Fun: Language Activities for Lock-down

Family Fun: Language Activities for Lock-down

Dear Parents and Carers, Welcome to REAL Learners. If you want to help your child understand Covid-19 a bit more, here is a useful website: https://www.mindheart.co/descargables . It has simple information, written in 25 different languages, that explains how the...
Bilingual Babies: Key messages for pre-school settings

Bilingual Babies: Key messages for pre-school settings

Working with pre-school children is enormously rewarding. They are full of enthusiasm and energy, soaking up the world around them like little sponges. Children who come to pre-school or nursery speaking a language other than English are in a great position to become...
Guided Language Activities: What our customers say

Guided Language Activities: What our customers say

We asked schools using our Guided Language activities a few questions… Q1. What are the benefits of the programme for your school? One Head Teacher summarised the materials perfectly, saying they are, “Very clear, very easy to follow and easy to pick up with...
Voices from the classroom: How EAL pupils help themselves to learn

Voices from the classroom: How EAL pupils help themselves to learn

Many schools in the UK are lucky enough to have culturally and linguistically diverse pupils coming through their gates every day. Yet UK classrooms are often largely mono-lingual spaces. So how do pupils learning EAL, some of them in the early stages of acquiring...
Pupil induction: the importance of being parents

Pupil induction: the importance of being parents

Joining a new school is always tricky even when you speak the same language as your teacher and classmates. Joining as a child from a different country, or even continent, and speaking one or several languages that no one else understands must be like stepping onto a...
The case of the vanishing language: valuing bilingualism

The case of the vanishing language: valuing bilingualism

Long summer holidays are great. But some teachers with children in the early stages of learning English express concern. They know that some pupils who speak EAL will go through the holidays without many opportunities to practice English. The consequences of this are...
Wolves Working Wonders with Reading

Wolves Working Wonders with Reading

How do you improve EAL pupils’ reading performance by the end of KS2? Mark Smith, Leader of Wolverhampton’s Citizenship, Language and Learning Team, has some answers. At Naldic’s West Midlands’ meeting on 2nd March 2019, Mark Smith reported successes in reading...
How Can MABEL Help Bilingual Assessment?

How Can MABEL Help Bilingual Assessment?

MABEL is an anagram for the Multi-language Assessment Battery of Early Literacy. Quite a mouthful, but a potentially useful resource for schools. Why? Because it can assess pupils’ early literacy skills in a small, but growing, range of languages. MABEL looks at...
How to help New Arrivals do more than survive

How to help New Arrivals do more than survive

Learning to fit into a new class, in a new community, in a new town, in a new country, must be a very scary experience.  Add learning a new language to the mix and the whole concept of ‘fitting in’ can turn into a living nightmare for many newly arrived children. What...
Teachers: 5 practical ways to welcome newly arrived pupils

Teachers: 5 practical ways to welcome newly arrived pupils

All newly arrived pupils want to belong; it’s a fundamental need. Students don’t want to be different from everyone else. They don’t want to receive special attention or be singled out for speaking an incomprehensible language or having an unpronounceable name. Their...