Student practice: Who are EAL students?

 Student practice: Who are EAL students? 

Welcome back to my blog! In today's post, I wanted to discuss and clear any doubts about what EAL students are. As you might know, I am completing my teaching hours at a British school here in Warsaw. This means that the students can be classified as EAL which stands for "English as an Additional Language". This means that the majority of learners are communicating in English as their main language medium. In addition, they have all of their classes and instruction in English, such as maths, science, drama and physical education. In this school, there are a handful of students who are native English speakers as they come from countries such as the UK, America and Ireland as well as many international students who come from countries such as Brazil, Dubai, Korea. There are also a number of Polish-speaking students who choose to communicate in English. As one can see, teaching these students can be seen as, at times, difficult as the class contains native and nonnative learners.

The role of the EAL teacher is to share opportunities to draw on pupils' prior experience, provide or develop differentiated resources to ensure pupils' access to the curriculum and development of EAL. Thus, it enables pupils to transfer skills from a given topic to aid understanding.

It could be confusing as to what is the difference between an EAL and ESL learner. EAL learners, as already mentioned, refer to learners who speak a language other than English as their first language and need additional support to develop a proficiency in English. EAL learners are often learning a new language at the same time as learning new content, understanding and skills from the National Curriculum. Whereas, ESL (English as a second language) are pupils who often come from non-English-speaking homes and backgrounds, and who typically require specialized or modified instruction in both the English language and in their academic courses. So, EAL focuses more on content while ESL focuses more on language.

I hope this post cleared up some confusion of the difference between the two types of learners,

Sara