Leverage the power of your classroom support to ensure your EAL learners feel engaged and connected to the lessons you teach

‘Using Learning Support Assistants to Support EAL Learners’: Explanation and Rationale

Learning support assistants (LSAs), also known as Teaching Assistants (although some schools may employ people as both and differentiate the job roles), work in classrooms under the direction of a teacher.

They are usually attached to a particular learner or to a particular class.

They may have certain specialisms, such as working with autistic learners.

The quickest way to find out what experience an LSA has and which learners in your school they work with is to talk to them, ideally outside of lesson time.

If you have an LSA attached to your class who has experience working with EAL learners, then you are in a great position.

They may know more about the subject in general, or the learners, then you do. If so, make as much of this opportunity as possible.

Ask them for their ideas and suggestions; plan activities for your EAL learners with them; observe how they work with the learners and what they do to help them learn.

It may be that the best approach you can take is to ask them to work closely with your EAL learners and to keep you informed of their progress.

You will need to judge how beneficial your own input will be.

If the LSA who is attached to your class does not have experience with EAL learners, there are still ways in which you can work with them to the benefit of those learners.

The key thing to remember is that an LSA is a second skilled adult working in your room.

This means there is scope to do things that would not be possible if you were in there on your own.

Work can be divided between the two of you. Learners or small groups can spend exclusive time with either you or the LSA. Specific areas of language development can be focussed on.

We’ll develop these ideas with examples.

Using Learning Support Assistants to Support EAL Learners: Example One

Ask your LSA to take a section of the lesson.

This could be the starter, an activity, or the plenary.

While they are working with the rest of the class, you can devote your complete attention to some, or all, of your EAL learners.

You can use this time in a variety of ways:

To gain a detailed sense of where they are at in relation to the topic and to gauge the current level of their English language abilities.
As an opportunity to do specific activities with them, perhaps different from what the rest of the class are doing.
To pre-teach vocabulary that will benefit your EAL learners in future lessons.
To work on a continuous project with them, like developing a bilingual glossary for a topic of subject.
To practice one-to-one speaking and listening.
To practice reading together.

Whatever you decide to do will be determined by your knowledge of your EAL learners and what their current needs are.

This is a technique you can use repeatedly over an extended period to carve out dedicated time for you to work closely with one or more EAL learners in your class.

Using Learning Support Assistants to Support EAL Learners: Example Two

Explain to your LSA that you would like them to work exclusively with one EAL learner, or a small group of EAL learners.

Devise some differentiated tasks you would like the LSA to lead and explain to them that the focus is on developing learners’ language skills while also ensuring they can access the work in which the whole class is engaged.

If possible, spend some time talking with your LSA about how to support your EAL learners.

Discuss some of the strategies and techniques they can use with them.

In some cases, it may be most effective to give your LSA a specific strategy you want them to use with your EAL learners.

For example, you might ask them to focus on getting your EAL learners to rehearse their answers verbally, before they write them down.

Or you might ask them to help your EAL learners get in the rhythm of using a bilingual visual dictionary to make sense of new vocabulary.

The advantage of this approach is that it provides clarity for your LSA and helps them target their effort effectively.

Having one thing on which to focus, and that being a strategy you know works, simplifies matters and often leads to better outcomes.

Using Learning Support Assistants to Support EAL Learners: Example Three

You may find yourself working with EAL learners for whom one specific aspect of the English language proves particularly difficult.

This could be one of the broad areas we use to define language – reading, writing, speaking and listening – or it could be something more specific such as writing formally or reading academic texts.

If you have an LSA in your classroom, you can ask them to work with your EAL learner, focussing specifically on whatever has been identified as the major difficulty.

This may result in them going off topic for a lesson or two. So be it. The judgement is yours to make.

You will need to decide whether an intensive period working exclusively on an area of weakness will bring benefits that outweigh missing a small amount of content.

I would suggest that in many cases it will.