EAL Digest July 2026

By Pete on July 22, 2026 • ( 0 )

I never really got this update off the ground a few years back. Feels like I need to keep track of different things I come across so I’m starting it again.

New releases

Oracy strategies for all ages and phases from Laura Bisiker. Looks good. Available through Hachette Learning here.

Teaching Conceptual Understanding in Multilingual Classrooms, van Eerdewijk and McCracken (2026). Available via Multilingual Matters.

Wait, Don’t Just Translate – Multildimensional Strategies for Emergent Multilingual Learners. Andrea Honigfeld et al (I think it’s just out). Available through Sage/Corwin here.

Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies for Multilingual Learners: Tools, Activities, and AI Companions for EAL Success – by Sarah Guinon. Out 2027 via Routledge (see here). No flashy cover yet. The AI bit interests me a lot with this one. I wonder – if I were writing a book on AI in multilingual/EAL contexts, how would I future-proof it? I have no idea. I’m keen to see what’s included in this one, probs the book I’m most excited about.

No front cover yet for our own multilingual strategies book, but we are on it. Not much AI in there from us, if any. Not due till March either. In today’s draft, I included a quote from Jo Gakonga about aardvarks. Worth the 15 quid on it’s own I’d say.

One Asia Readers

A great series of free graded readers focused on contemporary Asian contexts. See here.

Free webinars from Bell

Another free webinar from Bell for the international ‘Language Results’ segment. ‘Making subject assessment accessible for multilingual learners’, hosted by Ted Winslow (ISP).

ISP have been involved in these free webinars before. Here is a good one I watched a few months back where Ben Sell and Gemma D talk about an interesting home language initiative:

And another one from Tom Beakes on effective questioning techniques. I wrote something on this recently coincidentally – see here if interested.

Navigating language policies: a roadmap for international schools

I haven’t done an update for ages, so here’s an interesting article from Heidt et al (2025). It summarised how to develop, implement, and revise language policy, and is well worth referring to if you’re writing policy at your school. Banking it here to refer to later!

Heddle

I joined the Heddle Community to keep up to date with all things EAL. It’s quite good – fairly active discussion board (I mean, during term time it was) and there are some pretty knowledgeable people in there offering advice (Joanna Kolota, the aforementioned Sarah Guinon). They do a Meet and Share event every month (I haven’t attended yet) and occasional masterclass webinars. There’s a two tier membership thing. I’ve only got the free one, not sure about the paid one which is 350 quid a year (see here). Looks like you get quite a bit – training videos, masterclass webinar catchup, how-to guides.

ELLSA

I attended an ELLSA meet and greet in Bangkok the other month. It was pretty fun and informal. I missed their recent workshoppy event on ‘Visible Multilingualism’. I’ve attended ELLSA now in Malaysia and Thailand. The Malaysia one more active, and they provided more free sweets.

Interesting reads:

Instructional materials in multilingual literacy – LinkedIn article from Karten van Riezen.
One out of three ain’t bad – Eowyn Crisfield’s summary of the British Council Language Trends report.
For those based in Thailand, it’s worth reading about these curriculum changes as they impact international schools.

I also stumbled across this really cool resource: Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School (Baker et al, 2014). See here. They share four main recommendations, along with lots of practical advice and vignettes. Here are the first two suggestions FYI:

Favourite research read lately

Multimodal vocabulary instruction for English language learners: From interactive whiteboards to artificial intelligence. (Martin 2026).

Shared by Achilleas Kostoulas, whose own blog is increasingly interesting! Worth a follow.

EAL-related blog posts I’ve written recently

Not that active, as I’ve been vibecoding an IGCSE ESL resource website for teachers. Check out my progress here. Other than that…

This post was about an interview I attended with ISP.
This was on an oracy webinar I attended.
This was another semi-rant about how the CEFR is misused in EAL contexts.
An EAL basics talk I gave for uni of Sunderland back in April.
A sort of walkthrough for adapting a literature unit.

If you only read one EAL-related thingy from this update…

Pip St John – Pre-teaching vocabulary

I only recently learnt about Pip St John’s work in creating a structured methodology for pre-teaching vocabulary. You can find lots of interesting content on this on the NAPLIC site, including classroom demos. See here. She seemed like a pretty influential/respected educator.