Is an inability to speak or understand the language that you are instructed in when you’re at school a special educational need? It’s certainly a barrier to learning, but how much of a barrier likely depends on how little of the language a particular child understands. 

This is one of the issues that many experts have with the label “English as an additional language” (EAL). It groups children of vastly different levels of understanding of the taught language together, under a deficit assumption that generates, in their view, unfair beliefs about the abilities of those children. 

So how should EAL support be approached in schools? We caught up with Claire Connolly, an EAL adviser, to find out. 

Tes: We use the term EAL all the time, but is that label really useful?

Claire Connolly: The EAL label is very well-worn now, but it is rather clumsy and unhelpful. An EAL list in a school can run the full gamut from completely new arrivals with no English whatsoever right through to fluent multilingual children. 

Then if you look carefully at how the Department for Education defines EAL - any exposure to another language during early childhood in the home or community - it is extremely broad and so there might even be some children on that list who have just overheard another language.

The other problem is with the wording itself because, as academics have pointed out, English as an additional language suggests a deficit; it tends to focus us on what children can’t do as opposed to what they can. 

This can be further confounded when the EAL label gets bolted on to schools’ SEND provision when, of course, it is not the same thing. Alternative terms such as “multilingual learners” are becoming more popular and you can see how that better celebrates diversity and raises the kudos of speaking another language - because, after all, these children have a pretty amazing superpower.

Why do you think EAL has gathered such negative connotations?

I think it’s perfectly natural for teachers to have a slight panic if they see EAL on their new class register or if they get a mid-year surprise new arrival - especially as EAL will have barely featured in their teacher training. There is also no national guidance on EAL, so the nature and level of support can vary from school to school as they wrestle with different pressures, constraints and budgets.

Do you find a great deal of variation between schools when it comes to EAL support?

I think what happens a lot is that once children have been in school for a couple of years and they have their BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills), EAL support tends to drop off; but they still need it to develop their academic language. That’s quite consistent across schools.

What always really strikes me, though, as someone who gets to visit schools across phases, is how different the EAL student’s experience can be depending on whether they are in a primary or a secondary.

That’s interesting. Could you give us some examples?

I think it can be harder to support EAL new arrivals in secondaries - and I say this as a former secondary teacher. There are lots of practical and logistical differences.

Primaries tend to have more teaching assistants and more flexibility in the school day to fit in interventions. It’s easier to have a “go to” person for support available throughout the day in a primary, too, because there will be a class teacher. There is more informal play-based learning with peers, too, which is when so much language development happens. Also, teaching and learning are typically more visual and, of course, synthetic phonics and structured reading programmes are the bread and butter of primaries.

Being able to facilitate all of this in a large, busy secondary, with complicated timetabling, and not to mention exam pressure, can be much more challenging. When is there time for play? Who is confident in their knowledge of phonics? Because secondary teachers are experts in their subjects, and are busy teaching specialist concepts and language, students with EAL can have surprisingly big gaps in more basic vocabulary as this isn’t really seen as anyone’s job. Students with EAL might be in a GCSE maths class, for example, but might not know the word “rectangle”.

So is the primary school model a good example of what you would say good EAL practice looks like?

The schools that do EAL practice well find out where the gaps are in the child’s language and then set about plugging them. In Somerset, we use our EAL framework to assess and track across the A-E proficiency codes (which are free to download at supportservicesforeducation.co.uk), despite the quiet withdrawal of these codes from the government census requirements. 

Schools then use targeted intervention alongside lots of immersion in class. 

However, with “immersion”, we don’t want a sink or swim situation; there’s got to be skilled differentiation going on and lots of visual support so that even children with no English can access the learning. 

Children with EAL need to be sitting at the front or near the teacher so they can better hear what is being said and see the whiteboard. They need to be sitting next to a high-ability, articulate native English-speaking peer so they can hear complex grammar and a wide vocabulary modelled. They will need lots of repetition and extra time to process and respond. 

It is great when I see L1 (the first language) being used in schools, as getting students to explain, say, a Shakespearean character’s motivation in their home language means they’re going to be engaging with the concepts at a higher level. 

They need to have some downtime to consolidate what they have learned, and, ideally (even for teenagers, I promise!), some “play” time so that they can absorb language more informally from their peers.

It’s really important that all teachers see themselves as teachers of language and not just subject content, and that their marking has a grammar and vocabulary aspect to it. Making the most of tutor time to boost students’ vocabulary, like having a word of the day, will reap the rewards at exam time when they’re going to need to know 95 per cent of the vocabulary in a text to be able to understand it.

Overall, do you think things are better than they were?

In some ways, absolutely. I no longer hear staff anglicising EAL children’s names or telling parents to stop speaking L1 at home. It is getting rarer for me to see EAL children sitting at the back of classrooms or being put in the bottom sets or in SEND groups. But the number of children with EAL is continuing to rise, just as ethnic minority achievement teams are getting cut in many areas. Ultimately, teachers want the best for all their students, but we need to continue to ensure they have the training, support, resources, time and funding to deliver. 

Claire Connolly is EAL advisory teacher in the Ethnic Minority Achievement Service at Somerset County Council

This article originally appeared in the 13 November 2020 issue under the headline “How I… help schools to get EAL right”