Time used poorly
Being EAL myself, my first/home/native (pick one) language is Polish, I felt instantly drawn to this category of students and, quite frankly, I could relate to and bond with them quicker than with others. Although I was fluent in English when starting my teaching career, I remember my first year at University in Paris, studying Korean in French (yes, I really like languages). I still remember some lectures about Chinese Ancient History in French. Two and a half hours of white noise recorded on paper as three to five words and half a page of carefully coloured squares. Over a decade later, I would find Omar and many other EAL students presenting me with the same “quality” of work produced in their lessons.
TESOL techniques for all
This natural affinity with speakers of other languages quickly turned into the driving force and pedagogical philosophy behind my teaching. It was like a flash back, I had to, and could do something about it, so I started planning my sessions thinking of the EAL students first. I found the approach had a wider importance.
Here’s just some of the numerous TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) techniques I found to work with all my students:
1. TTT < STT
(Teacher Talking Time should be less than Student Talking Time)
This is one of the pillars of language learning; the more your students speak in lessons, the more practice they get and the more opportunities of correction arise for the teacher.
2. Spend some time on learning objectives
“This may be good in MFL, but we can’t really afford to spend 20 minutes of a lesson chatting about the learning objectives” I was told this by much more experienced colleagues from Science and Humanities Departments . . .
The cynical me was wondering how they’d defend spending similar amounts of time trying to cut down low-level disruption . . . The professional me reached out for a back-up in research. Robin Alexander (University of Cambridge) claims that,