EAL

In EAL at Laurel Park,, we want our students to fully engage in all aspects of school

life, becoming an integral part of the school community. We want our school to be a place of welcome where students will know that their language, culture, religion and traditions are embraced, respected and celebrated.

The curriculum for EAL aims to equip students with the English language skills that they will need to communicate effectively with their teachers, peers, and people who they come into contact with in their daily lives. It also aims to provide them with the academic language skills and confidence required to cope with lessons across the full curriculum.

We intend to support our students in understanding British cultures and values through sharing our experiences of our traditions and faiths, exploring our similarities and celebrating our differences. Each of our students with EAL brings with them a plethora of prior knowledge, skills, talents and experiences that they can draw on to be successful in school. We build on this by providing our EAL learners with a curriculum which is tailored to their strengths and we allow them to use their home languages in order to deepen their understanding and unlock prior knowledge of complex concepts.

We aim to ensure that students with EAL at Laurel Park can:

●       Understand and respond to the English language from a variety of authentic sources.

●       Speak with increasing confidence, self-esteem and spontaneity.

●       Use a variety of grammatical structures they have learnt when communicating.

●       Feel empowered to access the curriculum at a level appropriate to their English language proficiency.

Implementation

Students with EAL join the school at a variety of ages and with varied proficiency in English. The EAL curriculum is bespoke and fluid in order to suit the personalised needs of our students and is based on the DfE Proficiency in English Framework.

‘New Arrival’ and ‘Early Acquisition’ students receive EAL intervention. At Key Stage 4, this takes the place of an option and students work towards meeting and/or exceeding their English Language GCSE target grades. At Key Stage 3 students receive EAL intervention which is timetabled to ensure that they continue to have access to all core subjects and the rest of the curriculum.

Students who are at ‘New to English’ or ‘Early Acquisition’ learn:

●       Word level high frequency vocabulary.

●       Active listening skills.

●       The ability to communicate in short phrases and sentences both orally and in writing.

●       An awareness and understanding of the basics of English grammar including tenses, positive and negative statements, interrogative forms, singular and plural forms etc.

●       The ability to obtain information from text and to be able to pick up on gist.

●       Academic language used across the curriculum.

 Students who are ‘Developing Competence’ learn:

●       To develop and use an interesting and varied vocabulary.

●        To communicate with reasonable clarity both orally and in writing expressing feelings and opinions.

●       To use English grammar including more sophisticated use of tense, conjunctions and structure with growing confidence.

●       To learn and use rhetorical devices used by writers

●       To write analytical paragraphs about writers’ language techniques

Topics used in order to develop these language skills will include curriculum links such as; Geography of the UK, Science – human body, Art – language of comparison, PE – fitness and healthy living, historical events – past tense, RE – festivals and celebrations, Maths - the language of the four operations

 All of this learning enables our students with EAL to integrate into the mainstream curriculum and school life with growing confidence and self-esteem. We continue to monitor the English language progress of students with EAL whose proficiency enables them to fully engage in the school curriculum without intervention.

Our facilities

●       2 dedicated EAL classrooms with appropriate resources for the range of English levels of our students.

Curriculum

The EAL curriculum booklet can be downloaded here: