Teaching English as an Additional Language in Secondary Schools

Theory and practice

Seán Bracken, Catharine Driver, Karima Kadi-Hanifi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317667056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

With increasing numbers of learners in secondary schools having English as an additional language, it is crucial for all teachers to understand the learning requirements of these students and plan distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them. This book provides school leaders, trainee teachers and qualified teachers with the skills and practical knowledge they need to strengthen the learning outcomes of students for whom English is an additional language.

Teaching English as an Additional Language in Secondary Schools sets out realistic ways in which EAL learners can be engaged and stretched in their learning, building on their prior literacy, cultural experiences and language learning. It clearly explains the theory and key research into how additional languages are acquired and offers practical classroom teaching and learning strategies to show teachers how they can help EAL learners to access the curriculum and reflect on their learning through assessments.

Features include:

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• tasks to help put the ideas into practice

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• case studies illustrating the key challenges faced by EAL learners

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• summaries of key research findings

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• reflections to encourage deeper thinking.

Drawing on the daily experiences of teachers and teaching assistants, this book will be essential reading for all trainee and practising teachers that want to ensure students with EAL fulfil their true learning potential.

CHAPTER 1
English as an additional language

What does it mean, who is it for and how is it acquired?

Overview of this chapter

This chapter covers key terminology and concepts required for effectively engaging with all chapters in this book. It starts with a case study looking at the changing demographics within one medium-sized English city. This contextualises many of the later discussions and provides a rationale about why it is vital to engage effectively with English as an additional language (EAL). The chapter shows why EAL is such an important issue for society at large and for schools in particular. As the field of EAL is framed by a variety of terms and definitions across the globe, there is a need to identify the core phrases and terms that will be featured in the following chapters. A capacity to engage effectively with students for whom English is an additional language also requires an understanding of how additional languages are acquired and how socio-cultural contexts play a significant role in the language acquisition process. With this in mind, the chapter explores aspects of student linguistic identity and shares ways to incorporate student heritage and identity within the language learning process. The chapter concludes with an insight into some of the differing approaches to language learning and teaching that have informed teachers’ work in recent times.

Case study: Getting to grips with diversity – A look at the city of York

The city of York has a growing population of just over 200,000 people served by approximately 65 maintained schools. Currently, there are in the region of 23,000 pupils attending these schools. Recent figures indicate that a large proportion of the population comprises younger adults between the ages of 20–24. Among this cohort is a large number of immigrants coming from a wide diversity of backgrounds.

One of the pull factors to the city has been the steady growth in tertiary educational provision. New courses such as law and business studies have attracted students and their families from across the Gulf states (Craig et al., 2010, p. 19). Additionally, in the period from 2000–2010, the city hosted a growing number of asylum and refugee seekers particularly those from Turkish and Kurdish backgrounds. Another attraction for immigrant populations has been the availability of work in a range of skilled, semi-skilled and manual labour. From 2005 onwards, there has been an increasing population of Polish and other Eastern European communities who have taken up employment in the city and beyond. Many of them work in local service industries or in the seasonal agricultural employment available in the local hinterland.

Ethnic and linguistic diversity is increasingly the norm and there are now over 90 differing ethnic groupings resident in the city with somewhere in the region of 80 languages being spoken. The profile of the city has changed significantly since the 1990s when it is thought that there may have been in the region of five to ten distinct ethnic groupings (Craig et al., 2010, p. 19). York is perhaps typical of many medium-sized cities in the UK.

Task 1

For the town, city or region where you live or work, review the census figures available from the local authority and from the Office of National Statistics. Investigate whether there is a growing immigrant population and suggest three ways in which this may have implications for schools.

Terminology: EAL, a contested concept

The term English as an additional language (EAL) is used in schools throughout the United Kingdom. It refers to the fact that pupils may use one or more languages other than English in their everyday lives. The term provides scope for languages other than English to be incorporated into students’ educational experience. The use of the term EAL means that learning English should be viewed as adding to students’ capacities as bilingual or multilingual learners, rather than displacing the language/s that students may have acquired earlier.

EAL contributes to an approach known as ‘additive bilingualism’ (Baker, 2011), which encourages the use of a diversity of languages within the curriculum and the classroom. Increasingly however, schools have tended to use the term EAL, not so much as a planned approach to ensuring additive bilingualism, but more as a catch-all phrase to contrast cohorts of pupils whose home language/s may be other than English with those whose first language is English (FLE).

Reflection

• What do you understand ‘EAL’ to signify?

• What are your views about the maintenance and strengthening of a student’s language spoken in the home or wider community?

• How might these views, and views of other teachers, impact on school-based practices?

• How do you think EAL practices and policies might have changed in the city of York as a result of its changed demographics?

The realities of educational practices within a competitive educational system heavily reliant on terminal examinations mean that often there are very few opportunities to progress pupils’ literacy skills in one or more of the home languages. While the term EAL reflects an aspiration for maintenance and extension of students’ first languages, the predominant practices within schools and classrooms are more likely to approximate a ‘transition to English model’, which is focused primarily on the linguistic assimilation of pupils into the use of the dominant language of English.

The ‘transition to English’ approach is typified by practices where language and literacy support may be provided to immigrant pupils initially but are then withdrawn within a few years. Increasingly, in contexts of diversity there is a focus upon a push for schools to promote a shared core of ‘fundamental British values’ (DfE, 2014) where the overarching aim is to ensure that all pupils gain mastery in the dominant language of English and that students conform to the dominant social and cultural norms. This practice is associated with ‘linguistic mainstreaming’ of pupils where the intention is to ensure that pupils for whom English is an additional language are assimilated into the majority language and culture as quickly as possible.

Nevertheless, the term ‘EAL’ remains current. Schools primarily use an EAL identification of students to gather data about academic performance and to analyse how ‘EAL students’ compare with others in relation to academic attainment. Officially then, the term EAL is used to identify pupils ‘whose first language is known or believed to be other than English’, where the first language is identified as ‘the language to which a child was initially exposed during early development and continues to be exposed to this language in the home or in the community’ (DfE, 2013, p. 7).

Just as the term EAL has become somewhat dislodged from its initial conceptual roots, the continued usefulness of the term itself has recently been called into question (Wardman, 2012). The broad-brush descriptive nature of the term has been identified as being problematic. This is because the term refers to a very diverse group of learners and, as a result, it gives rise to uncertainty about the learning requirements of specific individuals or groups who may share similar literacy, educational and linguistic backgrounds. As identified by Arnot et al. (2014), those for whom English is an additional language include all of the following very different cohorts of pupils who:

• belong to very well established second or third generation ethnic minority communities where English may be one of the languages spoken at home;

• were born in the UK but whose parents arrived as economic migrants from throughout the Commonwealth;

• have moved to the country, as part of a family, as economic migrants;

• have arrived as asylum seekers or refugees fleeing turmoil in their home countries;

• have been trafficked into the country or those who are in looked-after settings.

Task 2

Frequently within school data sets, ‘EAL students’ are identified as a cohesive group. Identify the differing linguistic, cultural and ethnic groupings within your school and setting. Suggest how long individual students or groups of students may have been in the UK and reflect on the implications of your findings. Compare and contrast the differing learning requirements of individuals and groups of students with others in your setting.

Within each grouping identified above there are also important socio-cultural, geographic, linguistic, literacy and educational heritages that will influence the ways in which pupils identified as having ‘EAL’ may engage with their learning. As the linguistic diversity and ethnic backgrounds of pupils in the UK continue to increase, there are concerns that the catchall term of ‘EAL’ is overly broad and does not capture the precise nature of students’ linguistic capacities. In essence, while the application of the term EAL recognises some level of exposure to a language other than English in the home context, it provides no insight for teachers into the supposed levels of linguistic proficiency in English or any other language that students may have (Strand and Murphy, 2015, p. 2).

This poses a significant challenge for providing critical information to teachers. For example, students who may be very recent arrivals with very limited or no access to English are, for convenience sake, grouped with those who may be fluent in English and who may also have advanced literacy skills. The term ‘EAL’ is therefore far from straightforward and has become increasingly contentious. However, it would be challenging to create a term that adequately reflects the growing levels of complexity and diversity associated with the increasing heterogeneity that many schools experience.

Terminology: Additional key concepts

The language and terminology used to phrase discussions about students, their language capacities and how these interact with learning is critical. In contexts where the terrain for engaging with linguistic and cultural difference is ever more complex, it becomes increasingly important to develop more informed capacity for framing discussions aimed at strengthening students’ learning of English. Building a shared understanding of what is meant while using particular terms will help to build capacity to discuss language teaching and learning.

At times, in our desire to categorise and label for the sake of understanding, there may be a danger that we opt for very stereotyped or overly simplified traits of an individual’s linguistic repertoire. Overarching labels may not take into consideration more complex aspects of a student’s gendered, cultural, socioeconomic and ‘ableist’ identities, which may be simultaneously inherited as well as externally assigned. In doing so, there are dangers that assumptions are made that overemphasise only one aspect of a student’s linguistic, cultural or ethnic identity. Therefore, caution is required when assigning labels and categori sations. In essence, teachers are encouraged to build up increasingly individualised and well-informed perspectives of their students. Students and their wider communities should also play an important role in authoring the nature of ‘grouping’ or profiling individual and group linguistic identities.

Reflection

• What factors do you think influence a student’s ability to engage effectively in school?

• How might these factors be similar and different for bilingual students?

• How might teachers and school authorities get a more in-depth picture of the factors that impact on student engagement in school?

Throughout this book, the term ‘En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 English as an additional language: what does it mean, who is it for and how is it acquired?
• 2 Policy perspectives: a changing nation changing schools
• 3 Whole school policy, leadership and research-informed practice
• 4 EAL pedagogy and practice in the classroom
• 5 Enhancing EAL learning and teaching: using TEL and online resources
• 6 Advancing learning through assessment
• 7 Conclusion: key learning for practitioners
• Appendix 1: English: vocabulary, grammar and punctuation
• Appendix 2: EAL lesson planning sheet
• Appendix 3: group roles for oral
• References and further reading
• Index