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 ›
General
‘We’re on a journey with Bell / WIDA’
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 ›
Interview task: Optimising the development of SLA in an international school
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 ›
Research in brief: Disciplinary literacy and verbal language in PE
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 ›
Research in brief: Harnessing the translanguaging corriente
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 ›
Another year in review
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 ›
Research in Brief: Input Enhancement and L2 Grammatical Development
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 ›
Performativity in education
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 ›
Research in brief: Language ideologies and pedagogical tensions
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 ›
Further IGCSE ESL musings
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 ›
ELT Planning 