Mike’s Blog
Strategies, Ideas and Insights for Teachers and Leaders
Category: Teaching EAL Learners
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Immediately make meeting the needs of your EAL learners easier by opening the door to their skills, knowledge and experience
‘Eliciting EAL Learner’s Prior Knowledge’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale Every learner arrives at every lesson with a wealth of experience, knowledge and understanding. The difficulty for teachers is twofold.…
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Easily construct meaning for your EAL learners by tapping into what they already know and using it to fix new information in their minds
‘Using Analogies to Make Meaning’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale Analogies are a means of reasoning. They make claims through comparison, using this to demonstrate similarity. The inference is that…
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What not to say when you are teaching your EAL learners and why not to say it, especially if you want to avoid unnecessary confusion and ambiguity
‘Avoiding Idioms’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale Here are five idioms: And here are literal translations of these: It’s best to avoid idioms when working with EAL learners. (This becomes…
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Build the confidence of your EAL learners at the same time as you help them improve the quality and accuracy of their spoken language
‘Recasting’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale There is a fine line between giving learners guidance that helps them to improve and providing a critique that leads to a loss of…
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How to think critically about reading and writing when working with EAL learners
Why do we read? We read for different reasons, and our expectations of texts differ accordingly. In school, much of the reading we ask learners to do is in pursuit…
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Magically increase your EAL learners’ ability to think, understand and manipulate the written word with one of the simplest strategies around
‘Dictionaries’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale As humans our working memory is limited. This is widely viewed as seven pieces of information, plus or minus two. Long-term memory is far…
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Neutralise one of the most common barriers that stops EAL learners from writing and taking part confidently in the tasks you set them
‘Sentence Starters’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale When trying to write, getting started can be the hardest thing. The blank page stares up from the desk offering no help and…
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Bring the underlying patterns of language to the surface and help your EAL learners see more clearly how English works – and how they can master it
‘Word Relationships’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale ‘Oh dear,’ said the old dear looking at the stuffed deer in the window. ‘What’s wrong dearie?’ said her friend, Deirdre. ‘It’s just…
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Help your EAL learners create order from chaos by giving them a way to make sense of the new words they encounter
‘Word Taxonomies’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale Taxonomies are a way of dividing information into ordered groups or categories. They are a method of systematization in which similar things are…
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If your EAL learners know what good writing looks like, it’s ten times easier for them to target their efforts in a way that brings results
‘Model Good Writing’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale The thought processes behind any piece of writing are often opaque. What you see, when you read, is the end result. While…