Here’s a very brief insight into some day-to-day EAL planning.
I work with EAL learners in Year 4. Planning for my EAL lessons is informed by one of the following:
In their literacy classes, students were learning to use fronted adverbials (was a new one for me tbh). They were also reviewing expanded noun phrases as part of the same activity – descriptive writing based on images.
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Here’s a quick follow-up to my review of Stories Without End (Taylor Sapp, Alphabet Publishing).
As you may have read, I thought this was great resource which could be easily adapted to my own context. Here is an example of how I adapted one of the stories.
The resources as they are include a few lead-in questions related to the story content, a bit of vocab pre-teaching, the story, and some creative follow-up tasks.
I bulked these out a bit and created the following sequence around the text called ‘Spooky House’ (in which some kids are deciding whether or not to enter a scary looking house). This was for A2/B1-ish level. I taught it at Primary (without the grammar bit) and also Secondary (full content). Worked well for both.
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I take on materials development work for free sometimes. I appreciate that not everyone has time to do that, can afford to, or might want to. I choose to do it for different reasons.
Here are some (TRUE!) examples of how offering my materials development services for free has been worthwhile:
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Someone contacted me last week in a panic. ‘Aaargh, we’re going to start using Seesaw – any tips? Is it easy? Can you do a lot on it?’ etc.
I find Seesaw really easy to use as a classroom learning app for EAL. The functionality for slides and templates is like a Jamboard +1 (you pay for the privilege). You can do quite a lot with it – here are some random (very random) screenshots from my Year 4/5 lessons just to give you a general idea. These aren’t all-singing-all-dancing, I just want to reassure the person who contacted me that things will be more familiar than you imagine.
In no particular order…
It’s really easy to model activities/tasks when not doing a live lesson. In this example, I wanted learners to predict the captions for a load of images. I can record myself doing the task and add a voiceover with instructions too (students just click play button to view).
Scroll to *get on with it, Pete* for review.
Do you remember that BBC article about how rubbish us native speakers can be at communication? I think that put me off teaching idioms for a bit. I came to think of them as ‘flowery’ (as the article suggests) and likely to cause misunderstanding. I feel like some of Chan’s maxims of good business communication reinforce that viewpoint and don’t seem very idiom-friendly…
… yet in a later chapter of the book (English for Business Communication, 2020) Chan then lists the 50 most popular idioms used in business contexts, suggesting that learning these may result in ‘effective communication with native speakers of English’.
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This term I’ve tried out a few different ways to introduce a lesson. These ones have worked well. They might be worth reading if you’ve exhausted my previous list!
Example: 3rd conditional, regrets
Do a short gap fill on part of a song related to your topic. Mine was on some lines from Frank Sinatra’s My Way:
Regrets, I’ve had a few… (0.55 – 1.06)
Eduland is a short story project for the China ELT market. You write short fiction texts for young learners, add a few comprehension questions (guidance given), do one round of edits (typically), and get paid!
Currently, the short stories are part of a series involving a fictional family called the Jollys. Full road maps and character profiles are provided along with writing templates, topics to avoid, and plenty of other guidance.
Stories should be between 400-2500 words. Submissions are paid at 7 US cents per word.
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Mostly new releases, plus references to Premier League sticker albums…
New releases
This is a new series of blog posts for teachers looking to become materials writers. It aims to help future writers explore topics and issues in writing, encourage deeper insight into the content of published materials, and promote a principled approach to materials development.
Think…
This is a new series of blog posts for teachers looking to become materials writers. It aims to help future writers explore topics and issues in writing, encourage deeper insight into the content of published materials, and promote a principled approach to materials development.
Think
Rank these features of materials development in order of importance. There is no correct answer, it’s just your opinion!
Do you feel that published material should address all these features as standard? Why/Why not?
Do feel that each stage of a lesson should address some if not all these features? Why/Why not?
Tomlinson
Some of Brian Tomlinson’s key principles of materials writing (2011).
