English language acquisition covers the four elements of literacy: speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Your EAL learners are trying to master each of those, over time, as they learn English.

While each element has similarities, including certain prerequisites that lead to success, they are nonetheless different.

Here are some thought experiments to consider that make this point clearer:

• Imagine having a conversation with a friend, then going away afterwards and writing five hundred words about the same topic. What might be lost and gained through the writing?
• Imagine listening to a play on the radio and then getting hold of the script and reading it through yourself. How might these two experiences differ?
• Imagine having a discussion with your class about an interesting question. Then, afterwards, asking them to write an answer to the same question. On comparing the discussion and the written responses, what differences would you expect to see?
• Imagine you had to pick a topic at random from the dictionary and write about it, without stopping, for two minutes. If you then read what you had written, would it make sense? Would someone else understand it? Would they know why it had been written? Consider how the act of reading compares to the act of writing.

The four elements of language make different requirements and have different effects.

Thinking About Listening in the Context of Supporting EAL Learners

Listening comes first.

Babies can listen before they can speak. It is through listening that they learn language.

The same is true of older children and adults.

Many of the most effective language training programmes are centred on listening to native speakers and trying to imitate the sounds that they make.

This is because, of course, any language is initially just sounds. Meaning is attached to the sounds, but we must learn this meaning as well.

When a child is developing speech, they can physically indicate things they want by, for example, pointing or grabbing.

Therefore, they know in some sense that these things are there, and they believe they have the capacity to interact with them (a baby could reach for a rainbow).

These things, and let us take an example of a toy bus, have no linguistic meaning for the child as yet. The child does not think ‘I want the toy bus.’

It sees something, yes, and it wants that thing, yes, but beyond this there is nothing to say other than a noise that indicates desire.

As the child grows it comes to be aware of the particular sounds that parents and carers attach to the toy bus.

This happens through listening.

The attachments are arbitrary – a bus could be called a boogly-gloop – and so must be learned.

They are not innate to either the object, or to the human species.

Think back to the first time you heard a piece of music which you immediately fell in love with.

The chances are that, having listened to it again and again, you now hear it with great acuity.

You can pick out key changes, the arrival of new instruments and the modulations in the singer’s voice (if there is a singer).

It is unlikely you understood the song in this manner when you first heard it.

Repeated listens have helped you to remember the song. This, in turn, has provided you with the capacity to analyse it.

When you first heard it, it was all new. You were taking everything in. Your brain was immersed.

Listening, as such, can develop. The more familiar we become with sounds, the more we can deal actively with those sounds. This includes identifying the meaning that is attached to them.

It also includes ‘reading’ the intonation with which they are said.

‘Stop!’ can carry many different meanings, all of which are dependent on the stress, pace, volume and tone of the delivery.

My question to you, then, is this:

• How might immersing your EAL learners in the English language be a necessary part of you helping them develop their ability to hear English, rather than just the sounds that we make when we speak?

The Nature of Speaking and What It Means for Supporting EAL Learners

While listening comes first, it is not long followed by speaking and, once that arrives, the two remain inseparable.

As you learn to speak a language you can communicate with others in an increasingly sophisticated way.

The subject of this communication is either external or internal to the person in question.

The former refers to things that exist beyond the individual, for example a chair, a curtain, or another person.

The latter refers to things that are inherent to the individual. These include feelings, opinions, beliefs and so forth.

Mastering the basics of speech is vital for accessing the social world.

This is not to say those who cannot speak are outside of society.

Clearly people use sign language to communicate, and even those with severe disabilities can convey some or many of their thoughts through alternative means (including via technology).

Speaking, though, is the primary means we as humans have to share what is inside our heads.

It is closely linked to the formation and maintenance of relationships.

• ‘We don’t speak anymore.’
• ‘I can’t communicate with him.’
• ‘There has been an irreparable breakdown in communications.’

These phrases apply to situations involving two or more individuals.

All indicate the absolute centrality of speech to human relationships.

• The couple who ‘don’t speak anymore’ are unlikely to remain together.
• The mother who ‘can’t communicate with’ her teenage child is likely to feel like there is a gap developing between them.
• The warring factions who have ‘an irreparable breakdown in communications’ veer away from conciliation and mutual understanding and head towards animosity and suspicion.

Speaking, combined with listening, is the mainstay of language.

It is the natural, nurtured component that provides for our innate need to bond with one another and the skill, however first developed, to learn and to pass on information about ourselves and the world.

The temporary inability to make their thoughts understood can be deeply frustrating for EAL learners (so too for the teacher).

Equally, the teacher’s knowledge that the efficacy of their own speech is limited (or, in some cases, nil) – because upon hearing it the learner does not understand it – can also be frustrating.

The learner may feel the same.

They hear what seems to be an undifferentiated, meaningless mass of sounds, yet they know there must be some meaning hidden within, if only they had the means to access it.

To decode it. To make sense of it.

Speaking and listening account for much of language.

Both skills must be mastered by the EAL learner. The more adept they become at listening to spoken English and speaking it themselves, the easier it will be for you and them to cement your teacher-learner relationship.

This includes the academic part – where you are teaching them subjects, topics, knowledge and skills – and the non-academic part – where you are teaching them rules and behaviour as well as communicating with them in a non-didactic sense.

It is likely that EAL learners will develop their spoken English in advance of their written English and that they will be able to listen to English with acuity well before they can read it with ease.

This can cause a discrepancy about which you should be mindful.

It is not one exclusive to EAL learners.

An individual – be they a learner or an adult, someone for who English is a first language or someone for who it is a second language – may well be able to convey their thoughts more clearly and accurately in speech than in writing.

Speech is practised for long periods, every day.

It is attended by a range of supplementary means of communication:

• Facial expressions
• Body language
• Gestures
• Intonation
• Volume

It can be modified in response to the audience.

One phrase that is ubiquitous reads: ‘Do you know what I mean?’

Despite its overuse, it can nonetheless elicit important information. If the response is ‘no’ then we can try saying our piece again.

We may even choose to say the same thing differently, or to give an example, or to make an analogy.

That is not possible when writing.

The writer can edit their work, but any feedback they receive is limited and after the event. This leads us on to an important point by which we must distinguish writing from speech.

But before that, let me pose you a question:

• Thinking about the EAL learners you work with, how has your relationship with them changed as they have become more proficient in spoken English? What stands out for you?

How Writing Works and Why You Need to Know This When Teaching EAL Learners

Writing is a technology.

It extends the reach of human beings in time and in space. It has much in common with speech, but it also has much that differs.

We have already considered the example of instant modification. Let us look at some more:

• Writing requires something beyond the human body. This could be a pen, a piece of chalk, or a computer.
• Speech is ephemeral, writing is not. You or I could go and read the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of texts believed to be around two thousand years old. We can never know anything of the conversations those who wrote them might have had.
• Writing is linear whereas speech need not necessarily be so. Take a look at a book. See how the writing begins at the top left hand corner of the page, works its way across and finally finishes at the bottom right hand corner of the page. Now imagine a conversation with a friend. You might ‘go round in circles’. You might ‘come straight to the point’. You might ‘lose your point’. All these terms are metaphorical. Speech does not conform to geometry in the way writing must.
• Writing possesses fewer supplementary methods for specifying meaning. We have indicated how speech comes wrapped up in gesture, intonation and tone. Writing has punctuation. This is a much more limited system. Take the following sentence as an example: ‘How did you find it?’  On reading the sentence, you are relying on the context being sufficiently accurate to convey the precise meaning (or for some additional explanatory text like: ‘she said menacingly’). Yet, if we heard such a phrase we would almost instantly recognise the meaning, most likely by noticing where the speaker placed the stress.
• This leads us into reading. The contextual world in which a reader operates is vastly different to that which they work in when listening to speech. And it cannot be made up for by asking questions of clarification or requesting further information. When you are reading something, you can ask a question, sure. But generally, you will have to answer it yourself.
• To write accurately, in a way that conveys the meaning intended, you need to understand certain conventions and be able to recall (or look up) words and phrases. In speech, the same does not apply. While a high value is placed on precise speech and certain settings require you to follow formal conventions, writing makes much heavier demands on the individual to conform and to be consistent with accepted usage. Again, the option to adjust, edit, rephrase and recalibrate in the face of information received from the audience is simply not available.

The technological nature of writing should not be overlooked.

Disentangling writing and speech, and making this explicit to learners, is important.

Many learners – EAL and others – quickly become demotivated when they find themselves without the deftness of touch that they have when speaking.

The transfer of thought into visual language is taxing (remember, writing is visual); even more so if it is to be done accurately and precisely.

• How might it feel if you found yourself in a country where you spoke the language but weren’t able to write it? What might the process of learning to write feel like?

Thinking Critically About Reading and the Experiences of EAL Learners

We come last to reading.

Just as speaking and listening are joined, so too are reading and writing.

In each case we have a complementary pairing that covers the conveying of one’s own thoughts and the reception of other people’s.

Reading extends the cognitive capacity of humans well beyond that which writing on its own achieves.

Having access to books, or the internet, means having a permanently accessible store of knowledge and ideas that exist independently of your own mind.

Libraries are the apotheosis of this fact; public or university collections offer thousands upon thousands of volumes, each one containing the thoughts of others made available through there having been written down.

Through the internet, this idea has been supercharged.

But let me stick with books for a minute and use a single example to illustrate.

One with which we are all familiar.

The dictionary.

Consider the absolute impossibility of an individual retaining the entirety of even a small dictionary in their own mind.

They may be able to use and explain most of the words such an edition would contain, but it is highly unlikely their recall would be comprehensive. Never mind verbatim.

What is more, they would almost certainly not be able to produce explanations as precise and specific for every word.

Nor would they be able to ensure the consistency of these over time.

The dictionary provides each of us with an extension of our mental abilities.

It allows us to check our understanding of words. It provides us with the meanings of new words we encounter. It gives examples of usage. It may point to synonyms or antonyms. Some versions will explain the origins of words and how their usage has altered over time.

The ability to read is like a key to an enormous stock of human knowledge.

It allows us into the minds of others.

In the case of fiction, we experience the imagination of people who we may never meet.

Indeed, we can readily experience the imaginative landscapes of those who have been dead for centuries and longer.

The writings of Plato come from a civilisation eternally lost to us; the past is a place we cannot truly know. We can know of it, though, through reading those traces that remain.

Reading benefits from the logical structure of writing and its technical form. When reading we can revisit information at will, sure in the knowledge that it will remain identical to how it was when we first encountered it. This is not the case with speech; hence why it is always better to have a written contract than a verbal one.

We are also able to stop and return.

Folding over the corner of a page or inserting a bookmark ensures we keep our place.

We do not lose the moment as we might when speaking to someone. Nor do we run the risk of forgetting what was being conveyed; the information has already been written down and stored.

The memory work is done for us by the fixing of the words in physical form.

When reading we have a greater expectation of sense and logic than when we are listening to someone.

In the latter we do make these expectations, but they are caveated by the possibility of asking the speaker for clarification and relying upon the supplementary means of communication to disclose meaning.

In addition, we will probably be more ready to fill in gaps in our understanding through (whether consciously or not) the use of assumptions or reference to prior experience.

Faced with a piece of text that is unclear, garbled or seemingly nonsensical, we find ourselves without further immediate means by which to decode the writing.

The means that are available – asking another person to read it and offer their opinion; writing to the author; researching, if possible, using other texts – are time-consuming, unclear (where do I look for the answer?) and do not presuppose the same likelihood of success as the methods employed to decode speech.

This is not to say that when we come to read a text we arrive as if from nowhere, without any prior knowledge or understanding.

This is manifestly not the case.

A reader seeks to contextualise the text in front of them by placing it within the mental maps they already have.

By making connections to that which they already know.

And by hypothesising interpretations that can be tested through further analysis.

The more one has read, the more one has thought about the written word and its relationship to reality, the more there is available to aid the development of understanding when encountering a new piece of writing.

I say ‘development of understanding’ because it is often the case that a reader actively creates meaning from a text, as opposed to unlocking some definite meaning put in there by the author.

Our reading of a text is unlikely to be identical to the next person’s reading.

It is all a matter of interpretation.

EAL learners are at a disadvantage when it comes to reading.

In learning English, they are coming into contact with the language for the first time.

Therefore, they will nearly always start off far behind their peers in terms of what they have read.

Once they master the art of reading in English, they may still lack some (or much) of the contextual apparatus that other learners take for granted.

This difference diminishes as learners develop their English language skills (and context comes from experience as well as reading).

Nonetheless, it is an important point to consider when asking EAL learners to work with written texts.

Let me finish with a question about all this.

• Thinking about the EAL learners you teach, how confident are they in reading and making sense of the different texts you have in your classroom? And what are some of the barriers to reading they face?