English as an Additional Language at Rounds Green Primary School

INTENT

Here at Rounds Green Primary School, we are proud of our multicultural heritage. 41% of our wonderful children are EAL. We are extremely lucky that we have 37 different languages spoken at Rounds Green which enables us to celebrate and learn all about the different cultures of our children and bring all our children together to form our Rounds Green family.

At Rounds Green Primary School, we teach English as an Additional Language (EAL) to children who are new to English.

To welcome EAL children into our school we have positive links with Sandwell’s STEP’S centre who support/baseline our new arrivals. We have SEMH/TRAUMA support in place for children when this is needed.

Our aim at Rounds Green is to provide these children with high quality support to enable rapid acquisition of the English Language which will support their development across the curriculum. This will also create opportunities to continue to develop their understanding in their mother tongue language.

We will continue to communicate with parents/careers to ensure that learning is celebrated and continued to be developed at home.

IMPLEMENT

We have a designated, trained EAL lead who is passionate about valuing every child, supporting their progress and developing their confidence.  

Our EAL lead has created an EAL Buddy team for new arrivals to the school. This has and will continue to enable our new children to settle into their new environment. In time, our older EAL children are also trained as EAL reading buddies and will read with the younger EAL children to not only help with the reading and understanding, but to also improve their confidence, to use their English language and feel positive to do so.

Here at Rounds Green Primary School, all EAL children are baselined on entry into school. From this baseline all children then receive 1:1 targeted lessons and small group work to deliver targeted interventions in a designated teaching area which enables our EAL lead to use a language rich environment to support learning. During these lessons, pre teaching supports our Rounds Green EAL children to access the curriculum and take part in  class lessons with their peers with a more confident understanding of what their learning. Making sure that our EAL children are comfortable, happy and settled in class is our main priority.

A variety of teaching styles are employed; drama, singing and getting hands on in our forests school in addition to a classroom based lessons.  We try to encourage our children to celebrate their hobbies and interests and use the learning of English in all areas.

At Rounds Green Primary School, we use Learning Village/Across Cultures programme. This is not only used in school for learning but is also available for all our EAL children at home to continue their understanding of English.

Our EAL programme is based on the Across Cultures’ EAL Framework. This Framework aims to provide teachers with the skills and resources needed to successfully support language learners within the demands of the curriculum and of a multilingual world.

By implementing the Across Cultures/Learning Village EAL Framework, we aim to provide:

·       a full range of educational opportunities for all learners, fostering international mindedness.

·       opportunities for English language learners to interact socially and academically in English.

·       opportunities for all teachers to plan and successfully differentiate for the language demands of all learners across the curriculum.

·       opportunities for learners to develop and use their full multilingual linguistic repertoire, notably, their home language, to support learning across the curriculum and beyond.

Supporting our EAL learners is important to us and plays an important part of our school improvement systems and processes.

Rounds Green are utilising the expertise of our EAL lead to support our Oracy initiate in our whole school approach to making sure that every child finds their voice and has the confidence and tools to use it.

We are extremely proud to have links with other EAL leads in schools nationally and internationally. This has not only helped share good teaching practise, but it has and will continue to help develop our children’s confidence to communicate with other children from different backgrounds just like the children we have at Rounds green.

IMPACT

The EAL Lead tracks the children’s progress through the NASSEA Assessment Framework Overview in order to identify areas of need, their next steps and ​whether​ additional support needs to be put into place. A half termly Learning Village assessment is also an additional monitoring tool to enable our EAL lead to make sure all our Rounds Green children are where they need to be. Once the children’s linguistic skills begin to develop, they can access the curriculum at a wider and greater depth; also communicate ideas in more detail. This will be evident through their written work and their ability to hold longer, more complex conversations.