New Great Ideas video: Drama and Role Play

Drama and role play are effective classroom strategies that can be used with any age group, in any subject and with EAL learners at any stage of English language proficiency.

The newly published Great Ideas video ‘Drama and Role Play’ looks at the different ways of using drama and role play, why they are a Great Idea for EAL learners and offers examples that can be implemented in the classroom!

To learn more, click HERE

New guidance from the Bell Foundation: Welcoming Refugee and Asylum Seeking Learners

The Foundation has just published a new guidance page with a downloadable document about welcoming refugee and asylum seeking learners. It contains useful guidance for schools welcoming newly arrived learners who speak English as an Additional Language, as well as links to a variety of relevant teaching strategies and resources.

Click here to view the guidance page and download the leaflet

Inviting schools in the Leeds area for EAL project

Do you work in a primary school in the Leeds area with at least 30% of EAL pupils? If yes, we invite you to take part in the Q-BEx project, which is developing an easy-to-use tool for schools to use as part of their assessment of needs for EAL children. The tool consists in an online questionnaire (for parents to fill in) and automatic report generator, which can be used to draw a language profile of individual EAL children.

The project is now at the validation stage: we need to collect data from many monolingual and bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 to inform the calculations for the automatic report generator. If their parents consent to their participation in the study, the children will be invited to take part in two 45-minute sessions in which a trained researcher will test their abilities in English, memory, and reasoning. This will take the form of playful activities using a laptop. The parents will be asked to fill in an online questionnaire about their child’s language experience.

The sessions will need to be conducted in schools, at some point between November 2021 and February 2022 (at the school’s convenience). Each child will receive a certificate of participation and the school will receive a £5 book voucher for each child participating. If your school is interested in participating, please write to us at qbex@leeds.ac.uk