The Talk Rich Teaching project is a study being conducted by the University of Reading using a US-designed approach to teacher professional development called The Enduring Principles of Learning. This approach has had success in raising the attainment of all pupils, but particularly EAL pupils. To learn more, click here.
News
Welcoming Refugee Children: Advice and Guidance for Schools
The Bell Foundation recently hosted a webinar offering practical advice to schools about welcoming refugee children, with speakers from Schools of Sanctuary, Refugee Education UK and Nottingham Education Sanctuary Team (NEST). To learn more, click here
Upcoming online courses and webinars with the Bell Foundation
The Bell Foundation are offering are a variety of courses for both primary and secondary practitioners at UK schools in 2022.
Some of the courses include:
- Leading a Whole-School Strategy for EAL
- Supporting New Arrivals who are New to English
- Introduction to EAL Assessment
- Teaching Assistants: Working with Learners using EAL
PLUS many more!
If you are interested in attending any of theses courses, or want to find out more, click here to go to The Bell Foundations website.
Would you like to help us create a school-optimised version of the Q-BEx questionnaire?
We need teachers, teaching assistants, or EAL coordinators to help us gather feedback about the ease-of-use and accessibility of the questionnaire for caregivers and children.
What would you be asked to do?
We would like colleagues to use the questionnaire in their settings, with a caregiver or older child, and then provide us with feedback by participating in a focus group. The trialling and feedback will take place in January and February 2022. If you are interested or if you have any questions, please email us at qbex@leeds.ac.uk
The Bell Foundation – Parental guidance documents translated into Dari and Pashto
The Bell Foundations free guidance documents for parents of EAL learners ‘Helping children learn’ and ‘About the English Education System’ are now also available in Dari and Pashto to support Afghan refugees.
Click HERE to access the documents
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
International Database of Education Systematic Reviews
Last year, researchers within the Department of Education at the University of Oxford launched the International Database of Education Systematic Reviews (IDESR). The IDESR is the first dedicated space to publish systematic review protocols in education, whilst also providing a clearinghouse for registering and publishing protocols of planned and ongoing education systematic reviews.
This free, electronic resource, with a section focussing on Second Language Education, hopes to improve the rigour, relevance and accessibility of research synthesis in education and will be immensely useful for researchers, teachers and policy makers alike who now have a “one-stop-shop” for systematic reviews in this field!
To read more about this wonderful resource, visit IDESR.org.
You can also follow updates about the project at IDESRblog.wordpress.com and by following IDESR on Twitter @IDESR_org.
Less than a week until the start of the ‘Being Multilingual’ event series!
The Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) is holding a series of online events to explore what it means to be a multilingual speaker today. Join to find out what research has got to say about exciting new developments in the fields of language and literacy, education, health, neuroscience, and migration: https://bit.ly/2ThYjTO
The events are free to attend and will be held online, but you will need to pre-register here: https://bit.ly/2QWlLoS
All events will be 6-7pm British Summer Time.