Empowering Bilingual Learners

Dr Eowyn Crisfield joined me on the show to talk about bilingual education. How it’s a wider issue than busy teachers might have thought, why it’s her passion and what we can do to help our young learners and their families.

When a new EAL child joins our class, whether with some existing English or as a total beginner, it’s tempting to see access to the curriculum as the most significant barrier. We might not pause to consider how we show that pupil that we recognise the importance of their linguistic identity.

The ‘EAL’ label tells us nothing useful about the pupil in front of us, it just says that someone in their family home has an additional language. The pupil labelled EAL in the class list could have grown up in a fully English speaking environment or could be new to the country with parents who have no English at all. We have to be curious about the pupils in our care and find out what ‘EAL’ means for them and their learning.

In these circumstances, as in every school, every adult in the school is a teacher of English; pre-teaching vocabulary, modelling structures, providing a receptive listening ear and bringing their gift of comprehension to the learner’s gift of expression. The lunchtime supervisor must be just as on board as the class teacher.

Teachers can make their classes much more welcoming by learning even a very few words of a child’s home language - whether that’s Polish, Pashto, Yoruba or Arabic.

Could you invite parents in to share language as a celebration of culture and diversity?

Are you a language learner yourself? If you can model getting something wrong and trying again then your young learners will learn it’s ok for them too.

Some pupils, trying to fit in in their new environment, attempt to cover up their home language. Experts tell us that schools should encourage families to continue to use their heritage language. Parents trying to bring up children in English are likely to struggle. It might be possible to bring up a six year old with limited English but it’s very hard to bring up a teenager without a fully expressive command of the language.

With no statutory training or framework for EAL, teachers can be left to fall back on their own experience of language learning or on staffroom folk wisdom. However, many of the factoids out there just aren’t true. Children don’t learn languages more ‘naturally’ than adults, children can’t ‘catch up’ and become fluent in just a few months.

Schools need a nuanced understanding of pupils' language development. There are many excellent resources freely available online such as the tool developed by the Bell Foundation which tracks learners’ progress from absolute beginner, through basic functional competence and onto the academic fluency that takes five to eight years to develop. We recommend more specific resources on the podcast - do give it a listen.

Ultimately, our job isn’t to turn pupils into native speakers - it’s about making them confident communicators. Let’s stop thinking of the EAL child as somehow in deficit; after all, bilingual people do better at university and get better paid in their careers. As Dr Crisfield says, we should want for our EAL pupils just what we’d want for every other child: “An environment where every child that comes through the door has the opportunity to thrive in a curriculum that meets their needs”.