Methods of teaching English to EAL children

Most EAL beginner students are on the preproduction stage (silent language) of language acquisition, some of them are those who are on early production stage (social language). When I get a new EAL child my primary concern is to help him/her to adjust and build confidence. First couple of weeks the performance standard needs to be reasonable, sometimes even a bit lower than the child’s ZPD. As comfort increases the requirements are increased accordingly. As for me, the most important teaching strategy is the extensive use of visual clues and ICT. Visualization is used in learning all aspects of the language and it is especially important in fictional types of writing when the students cannot build on their personal life experience. Next big challenge for an EAL is poetry. It is difficult not only to write poems but also to understand the language of the written ones as the authors use descriptive language. The work on adjectives, similes, metaphors, personification should preceed poetry units. It is important to try and attend to all children’s intelligences and make use of all senses which helps to make learning more effortless. Using games, cards, different manipulatives helps to refer to tactile senses, kinesthetic perception when images are not enough. We try to visualize some difficult aspects of grammar using grammatical posters done on computers by children. IWB is a great aid in visualization. It is used in several ways: - Games - Stories - Songs Besides IWB is used for reading books on it. Reading aloud to and with the children is really important and at an early stage of LL oral language need to be supported by print. It is helpful to point to the words while reading – something that can’t be done with a real book. So, pictures, pictures should be present all the time. Visual images help young learners to feel through the task. Emotion is the on/off switch for learning and positive emotional response is extremely important on the way to educational success and enjoyment in learning. Having children from different countries it is really important to learn some information about their language and culture. There may be a place for great communicative differences. - Korean students - Japanese students - Russian students Language transfer errors are very frequent for beginning EAL. Some sentences that are produced by Korean/Japanese Russian students may sound horrible but they are the result of linguistic differences. The child does not intend to irritate the teacher keeping up doing the same mistakes, he or she only builds sentences according to the structure common for the first language. Final point is the way teacher speaks to EAL students. Talking slowly, repeating, paraphrasing, using synonyms and trying to avoid slang and idioms. Still, sometimes even common classroom language can be confusing to children, as in case of using phrasal verbs. The teacher gives some basic instructions to the children that seem easy to understand but he gets no reaction back as they only know the primary meaning of the verbs being used.