I teach a mainstream Year 7 class. The overall level is very high, but sometimes I think the in-house content we have could do with more scaffolding at times. I mean, it’s awesome content – I’m just talking a few… Read More ›
I teach a support group of EAL learners in Year 6. We study the same content as all other English classes and take the same assessment. It’s just that the content and lesson resource needs a bit of adapting to… Read More ›
I hear this a lot during my interviews for EAL teaching/leadership roles. It’s in response to my question about which EAL assessment tool(s) the school use and *the extent to which they are embedded*. I love the honest responses from… Read More ›
I had a positive job hunting experience towards the end of this week. I put out the feelers for work at a good school on Wednesday, was offered an interview on Thursday, interviewed Friday morning, then rejected Friday afternoon. Why… Read More ›
Yep, I’m still AI-novicing over here. Today I was looking for a quick fix for the upcoming IGCSE ESL speaking exams (window opens end of March). I wanted a curated bank of tests, or at least test-like questions for all… Read More ›
I haven’t come across many studies into disciplinary literacy development in PE, so this action research from Lindberg (2024) is fascinating. Here’s a very brief summary – logging it here for my own reference more than anything! The action research… Read More ›
Article: The translanguaging pedagogies continuum (Ossa Parra and Proctor, 2022) Link here Summary: Research into best practice for teaching multilingual learners (in the US and elsewhere) has focused on English-only instructional settings, and systemic monolingual contexts. This runs contrary to… Read More ›
An interesting one – lots of change! Leaving Malaysia My two-year contract at St. Joseph’s International School ended in July. During those two years, our EAL team achieved a lot. Establishing an EAL department in the high school, building multi-tiered… Read More ›
Here’s an example of the EAL content I’m putting together these days. Last year, I was teaching a group of A1-A2 level multilinguals (Year 8, aged 13) in a support group. We were looking to introduce them to authentic literature…. Read More ›
The research: Leow, R. P. (2008). Input enhancement and L2 grammatical development: What the research reveals. (Open access, see here) Type of research A meta-analysis of research into the effectiveness of different input enhancement techniques. The range of studies were… Read More ›
I tend to post my short-thoughts on LinkedIn rather than on this blog. This one is an example from around 8 months ago – but I decided to post here too just for easy reference. I originally came across Ball’s… Read More ›
An interesting (small scale) study on home language use in the EAL classroom from Neokleous and Natlandsmyr (2025) – Link here. Plenty of interesting findings within those themes: Theme 1 Theme 2 Relating this to my context The findings seemed… Read More ›
A few months ago, I wrote a post on the value of the IGCSE ESL course. I’ve had a few other thoughts since, which I’ve shared on other platforms. I just wanted to file those thoughts somewhere under ‘random Pete… Read More ›
Project manager (PM): So, this new product is the big one! General English resources have never been so pointless, which is why TITLES MATTER. (Everyone unmutes their mics to shout ‘hear, hear’ and bang stuff down loudly and repeatedly) PM:… Read More ›
ELT Planning 