Theme: Disciplinary Literacy: The EAL Learner Journey – School Support – Research
Convenor/s: South West RIG
The EAL Learner Journey through the Exam Years
Catherine Brennan will share a case study of how the Better Bilingual team supported newly arrived EAL learners who studied for GCSEs and A Levels in school. Based on a case study of a student’s lived experience she shares the successes and challenges and critically evaluates approaches that can be adopted used to support learners.
Biodata: Catherine is Director of Better Bilingual, an independent education consultancy based in Bristol, UK, which she co-founded in October 2016; September 2020 saw the creation of Better Bilingual CIC as a social enterprise. Catherine also works as an Associate for the EAL Academy and is an active member of NALDIC. A passionate advocate for multilingualism and race equality, Catherine has collaborated with a variety of educational settings and professionals to secure the best possible outcomes for children and young people of BAME heritage – and those with English as an Additional Language (EAL) in particular. She has over 20 years’ experience of working with learners across the age range, 3-18.
How Schools can Support EAL Learners in the Exam Years
Helen Hanford shares insights gained from projects she has carried out in schools and how schools can support EAL learners through the exam years by adopting genre-based pedagogy. She highlights how genre-based analysis can open up access for students to higher level writing skills that supports both their development of critical thinking and ability to communicate complex ideas coherently when writing during the exam years.
Biodata: Helen is a qualified language, literacy and EAL trainer and consultant with over 25 years’ experience in developing language and literacy across the curriculum in diverse, multilingual primary and secondary school contexts. She is based in the West Midlands, UK, and specialises in optimising pupil outcomes through strategic, whole-school approaches to the development of academic registers of language. She is currently a literacy advisory teacher for Wolverhampton City Council’s school improvement team, and a trainer/consultant for the EAL Academy and Lexis Education’s SFL-based teacher development courses.
Disciplinary Literacy and Data Driven Learning in the Exam Years
Gail Forey and Reka Jablonkai will briefly discuss some of the recent research in the field of disciplinary literacy, writing in the exam years and data driven learning. They will also introduce their new project Disciplinary Literacy & Corpus-Based Pedagogy: The BAWESS (British Academic Written English Secondary School) Corpus (The BAWESS Project), which aims to build the first ever corpus of writing in the exam years and develop an online resource for teachers.
Biodata: Gail & Reka both work in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Gail’s area of expertise is systemic functional linguistics and Reka’s is corpus linguistics and data driven learning. They have both carried out a number of research studies and published papers that focus on language and education.
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