EAL Digest, August 2024

By Pete on August 4, 2024 • ( 0 )

I’ve had some help from Adri Szlapak with this update! We’ve been adding interesting EAL stuff to a doc throughout the month. Here it all is!

New releases

Pedagogies for Equitable Access was released at the end of July. For more info see here. Thanks to Larisa Olesova for sharing via LinkedIn.

‘An asset-based approach to multilingual learner terminology’ from the Institute of Education Sciences, REL West. See here – released in May 2024 so we are a bit late! Thanks for Jacob Huckle for sharing via LinkedIn.

Training courses

Bell Foundation EAL training in September

The EAL Coordinators course from the Bell Foundation will run again in September. Here is a link to sign-up. Here is my review of the course from last year.

Bell are also offering a course in Sept on assessing EAL learners, you can sign up here.

TEMC/TEYLMC

The Teaching in English in Multilingual Contexts course from Lexis Education runs remotely in September – for those in SE Asia and Australia regions. See here if interested. There’s a young learner focused version of the course running too.

International School Leadership Academy

I came across this EAL training course delivered by Shane Leaning – an organizational coach and former EAL lead. Shane has opened up some of the course content as a preview, so you can judge for yourself whether it would be valuable for your team.

Webinars

Multilingual mornings

These ‘multilingual mornings’ webinars sound really practical:

To be honest, I can’t work out exactly who is hosting it. It looks like Nexus International School in Singapore? I wondered if Multilingual Partners was a consultancy but couldn’t find a link for them online. Either way, content sounds great!

Language-based pedagogy

Lexis Education providing a free webinar in a few days time:

Valuing Multilingualism

The British Council recently ran a mini-event on Valuing Multilingualism. You can watch recordings of the two webinars and one panel discussion here. Adri delivered one of the sessions in which she introduces some translanguaging strategies. A link to the session handout for a skim read is here.

Multilingual Learner summit

Here are the recordings from sessions at the 2024 Multilingual Learner summit. I need to catch up with these myself. The keynote was by Dr Jeff ‘bricks and mortar’ Zwiers, cool!

Adri’s webinar recommendation: Focus on multilingualism and translanguaging in education with Dr Jasone Cenoz. This is not a new one, but Adri says it’s great watch. Added to my playlist!

Conferences

Here are the dates for ELLSA 2025, which will be hosted in Beijing:

Here is a ‘EAL conference buzzphrase bingo’ card I’ve created:

As you can see, the wording from the ELLSA conference advert almost gives me a line! I await the pre-conference promo videos to see if I can get my bingo dabber out again.

Podcasts

Primary Futures: Speaking Multiple Languages with Eowyn Crisfield

Collaborative assessments for MLs via Tan Huynh.

What is effective EAL teaching in the Gulf? via Gemma Donovan

Blog posts

I haven’t come across too many new blog posts this month to be honest. You could check back through the EAL Inclusive blog for interesting reflections.

Seeing as there wasn’t much new, here’s a cool throwback post from Alice Leung on field, tenor and mode. Really useful for EAL! We have it as a recommended read in our upcoming book.

I’m also going to big up Helen Legge, with her ESL turned EAL blog ‘The Teacher Trials’. She hasn’t posted for a long time now, but the EAL Basics post from 2022 is a good one.

Personally, I’ve put all my EAL-related posts on one page (here) as I archive more TEFLy type stuff from yesteryear.

Research bites

Paper: Translanguaging – what is it besides smoke and mirrors? (Treffers-Daller, 2024)

This is a really interesting *and open access* critique of translanguaging. See here.

Treffers-Daller begins by sharing various definitions of translanguaging, pinning down some of the central claims made by translanguaging theorists:

The author sets about exploring and mostly refuting these claims. They move on to discuss pedagogical translanguaging, highlighting that we still lack an agreed set of effective, evidence-based strategies to employ in the classroom, and that the value of translanguaging strategies for (e.g.) newcomers to English may be limited. There is further critique regarding how translanguaging has been ‘situated as part of the decolonization agenda’. Here are Treffers-Daller’s conclusions:

While this does read as quite a damning critique at times, the author makes plenty of valid points. It’s worth noting that the Treffers-Daller considers the use of other languages (such as learner L1) in the classroom to support the learning of English as commonplace, well-established, and beneficial. The author certainly isn’t advocating for monolingual approaches – they are merely concerned with the need for conceptual clarity and a stronger evidence basis for translanguaging pedagogies.

Other stuff

Book recommendation from Gemma Donovan

Here’s a link (non-affiliate as always) to buy the book, published in 2022.

Twinkl EAL ambassadors

Apparently Twinkl will have some EAL ambassadors from September:

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever used a Twinkl EAL resource. I’ve used and adapted some of the mainstream content, and my school has a subscription. It might be useful to see some ambassadors promote the EAL content so it’s more on my radar. I hardly see any Twinkl promo since Miranda Crowhurst left the ESL sector – she was awesome!

What are your views on Twinkl EAL content? Any good?

Call for authors

A call for authors from TESOL International Association, who are looking for specialists to write teacher development books on English-medium instruction.