This term we’re trialing an approach to pre-teaching academic vocabulary. Here’s the basic process:

Step 1: Subject teachers identify 10-12 items of key vocab for an upcoming topic in either science, humanities, or maths. This should happen a couple of weeks before the topic is taught. They share their word list with our EAL team.

Step 2: The EAL team create a keyword reference doc, like this one:

(This is an example I put together a while back. Would probably make some changes to the content /appearance if I’m honest, but it serves as an okay example for teachers)

The reference doc includes words in context, definitions, visual support, useful collocations, practice activities, and so on. Most practice activities are things like vocab matching, but we include a ‘questions your teacher might ask (using this vocab)’ activity so learners can rehearse for possible dialogues/questioning stages in class.

Step 3.1: Subject teachers inform learners of the new topic a week before they start teaching it. They share this reference/crib sheet thingy with EAL learners in Google Classroom and instruct them to engage with the content, complete the translations, etc.

Step 3.2: The EAL team check in with learners about the new vocab during our study support sessions. We support learners to understand content, complete the tasks, etc. 

(We may also use the content as part of our main EAL lessons, but this could be for reviews later on rather than as part of the pre-teaching)

Step 4: the checking/practice tasks (see the QR codes linking to Wordwall activities) are set as Wordwall assignments where possible. This means that learners need to complete them by a certain date. If you know Wordwall, you’ll know the type of feedback you can get – not just whether learners have completed the task, but how they performed, which items they found challenging, and so on. This info can be used by subject teachers to inform planning.

Step 5: review content after the topic is taught. Learners have a ready-made reference doc to help them review and prepare for common assessments.

Repeat.

So, basically a kinda flipped learning but with support if needed (see recent Tom Woodhouse post on flipped learning – a good one).

Why this approach?

I meant to trial this last academic year. I felt it would be a good step towards collaboration between the EAL team and other departments. We don’t have the capacity/resources for lots of in-class support, so we need open channels of communication with departments to identify the support needed for our learners. This *might* work well, especially because a) it’s involving subject teachers in identifying specialized vocab, b) the EAL team will take on the materials creation side of things so it’s not a burden on subject teachers, c) it can become a routine for learners and hopefully they’ll be buy-in, d) the reference sheet has a couple of nudges for subject teachers too, reminding them that there’s more to vocab input that just introducing words in isolation. 

At the very least, I feel this approach offers a good primer for learners – giving them a heads up regarding upcoming topics and a chance to explore content (perhaps in their home language) prior to the topic being taught.

Challenges

Well, buy-in from subject teachers is always a challenge as they are so busy. Buy-in from learners – we will need to be ‘on it’ with lots of active dialogues around the new content.

One limitation is that this type of pre-teaching will only work for certain topics. Take a lot of topics at KS3 science and I’d say, with clear visuals and potentially learner funds of knowledge, this would work fine. Get to more complex topics that *really* need to be taught first (by the subject specialist) and pre-teaching won’t be that effective.

Mind you, I guess that does depend of what is being pre-taught. As one of our science teachers (James) highlighted to the other day, it’s not always the ‘sciency nouns’ that we need to teach – its often command words. It’s also the ‘mortar around the bricks’ as Zwiers might refer to it – a lot of the Tier 2 language basically/crudely.

Early stages

We’re at Step 1 right now, and we’re trialing it with one teacher in each of those three departments. The humanities teacher has been very proactive with word lists and questions about the process. I’m latching on to that enthusiasm!

What’s the grand plan with this?

Well, ultimately we’d want a consistent and familiar approach to pre-teaching for new topics across the high school. It’s a slow build – and we need to see how it goes down with teachers/learners.

With a large enough EAL team, producing the resources is doable/sustainable. The goal for me though would be gradually handing over the materials creation process to the subject teams. Not just that they become familiar with the type of information we would include about new language, but that they would come to see the WHY. And why for certain language choices too. We want those types of discussion and upskilling to happen – let’s see.

If you’re a regular reader of the blog then you’ll know I document failures and frustrations as well as successes. The jury is out on whether this one will get the buy-in it needs, and also whether the actual resources we want to produce will be of value. I guess there’s also apprehension regarding whether pre-teaching as an approach is principled. All that said, it does feel like we need to provide much more support for language development in our context than we currently do, and see this approach as worth trialing.

I’ll update you on the failures in a couple of term’s time.

Image by WOKANDAPIX from Pixabay

Categories: General, reflections, teacher development

Tags: cpd, curriculum, eal, language development, pre-teaching, vocabulary