Theme: The multilingual child in the classroom
Convenor/s: Fazana Farook
This Special Interest Group will be an opportunity for beginner teachers undertaking their training year to meet once a term to discuss their experiences working with multilingual children and communities, share best practice and network within a language-focused teaching community.
The multilingual child in the classroom
In classrooms all over the UK (and indeed all over the world), we find pupils who use more than one language on a daily basis. Some of these pupils are also new to learning in English. In this meeting we will look at how our multilingual pupils process language when they are learning content as well as building their literacy skills in English. We will consider how we can use all of their languages to support their learning and enrich the classroom in the process.
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Speaker: Fazana Farook
Fazana Farook is a senior lecturer in teacher education at University of Hertfordshire, where she runs the PGCE and School Direct Secondary English course. She is also the EAL Lead across primary and secondary ITE at the university. Fazana started her teaching career as a secondary English teacher, working in linguistically and culturally diverse schools in inner and outer London, UK. She went on to became an EAL Coordinator, as well as a Lead Practitioner in English and Whole School Literacy and an ITE Lead. Fazana’s research interests focus on the relationship and interactions between multilingual communities and the UK education system. She is currently researching beginner teachers’ perceptions of (i) the concept of multilingualism and (ii) pupils identified as EAL as they train to become teachers in England.
Speaker: Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics and French from the University of South Africa, a PGCE from the University of Sunderland and an MA in Applied Linguistics and Communications from Birkbeck College, University of London. She has lived and worked in Thailand, the UAE, South Africa, Belgium, Oman, Sweden and the UK, and has raised two bilingual children. Susan speaks, to varying degrees, English, French, German, Afrikaans, Swedish and Arabic and is a lifelong learner of languages. Susan has a particular interest in the area of language policy as a driving force in promoting multilingualism within families, schools and on a national level. She is active in the local community in promoting the use of home languages, delivering regular parent workshops around the joys and challenges of raising multilingual children in monolingual environments.