Theme: Writing challenges for Multilingual Learners

Convenor/s: Dianne Excell

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Guest Speakers:

Aylin Erengul Gregg – From Ideas to Effective Writing: The LEAVES Approach

How can we help multilingual learners express their ideas with greater confidence, clarity and independence? LEAVES (Language Exposure and Acquisition through Validation, Engagement and Scaffolding) connects language-aware teaching with practical support for writing.

Drawing on classroom tasks and student responses, Aylin, a secondary English Language Acquisition specialist at IGB International School in Malaysia, will explore how to build on students’ linguistic resources, unpack model texts and scaffold purposeful language choices. Examples from persuasive, informative and creative writing will show how validating students’ identities, engaging them in meaningful interaction and providing purposeful scaffolding can help them develop ideas, organise texts and revise for meaning and effect.

Participants will leave with practical strategies for strengthening writing while affirming learners’ identities and preserving their individual voices. The session is relevant to classroom teachers, subject teachers and EAL specialists.

Catharine Driver

As a very experienced former EAL Coordinator who contributed to some National Strategy EAL documents, Catharine was a member of NALDIC’s Executive Committee before working for the National Literacy Trust. Although she will focus on work in the Secondary Phase, the principles she highlights are all relevant cross phase and cross curricular. Her talk will include assessing an EAL student’s writing in Science; planning to support writing in Science to include multimodality, language functions and nominalisations and a PE lesson designed to develop pupils’ formal talk as a preparation for answering an exam question.