Personal and Professional Information

1. Personal and Professional Information Name: Keisha Reid Current Role: Head of English as an Additional language (EAL) at an inner city secondary school in Birmingham, England. I also mentor newly qualified teachers and trainees. Professional Interests: interaction between pupils in bilingual / plurilingual settings, role of L1 in additional language learning and the development of academic language.

2. What is EAL ? In the UK, EAL is the teaching and learning of English through the content of the curriculum to pupils whose first language is not English. Newly arrived pupils are usually given additional help in learning English by specialist teachers or by bilingual classroom assistants. Where appropriate, schools may also set up small group withdrawal classes to provide more focused support. (Department for Education and Skills, 2005)

3. School Situation 800 pupils attend the school Key Stage 3 Years 7 – 9 (11-13 years) Key Stage 4 Years 10-11 (14-15/16 years) Key Stage 5 Sixth Form or Post - 16 • Newly arrived pupils join the school almost weekly • Most of these pupils do not speak English • A few have never had formal schooling or have been out of school for a while • A high proportion of unaccompanied minors (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe)

4. School Situation • Two qualified teachers of EAL / ESL • Four teaching assistants

5. Government Policy Official Government Policy states that students should be taught in mainstream classes and rarely withdrawn for language support. (Office for Standards in Education, 2011) Challenges • Financial constraints leading to a loss of specialist teachers • Training and professional development for staff • Provision varies in different cities

7. How my work relates to the topic • Additional language learning in a multilingual environment • School language projects: I would like to see this in action • Acquisition of communicative competence • I work with multilingual students who now have to learn yet another language and in an educational environment. • As a school, we would like to integrate additional languages into the teaching system • To support our bi/multilingual students so that they can continue to learn in one of their other languages (Dilemma – which language?) • To enable our monolingual students to use another language in real-life situations (different from foreign language lessons) and to learn in another language

8. Teachers’ Standards • 'have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs; those of high ability; those with English as an additional language; those with disabilities; and be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support them'. (Standard 5).

9. On paper only but the reality is that many schools have lost their specialist EAL teachers , bilingual teachers and teaching assistants and budgets to provide resources for pupils new to English.

10. Innovative Aspects • Groups of schools employing and sharing specialist staff such as bilingual teaching assistants, specialist EAL teachers. East EAL Hub: A group of secondary and primary schools in East Birmingham. Two (one primary & one secondary) specialist EAL teachers at the moment. I am the coordinator of the EAL Hub. Aims • Observe good practice in other schools and other societies • Adapt strategies and methods

11. Innovative Aspects / Good practice In the state – sector CLIL: Subjects such as Geography, Citizenship and History taught in French, Japanese, Spanish. Not yet widespread but a few schools now implementing CLIL.

13. Questions