EAL

Multilingual Learners

At Earlsdon Primary School, we celebrate and actively support the linguistic diversity of our school community. With over forty languages spoken by our pupils, multilingualism is a core strength and a vital part of our inclusive ethos.

At Earlsdon Primary we see multilingualism as an asset and like to celebrate the languages spoken by our children and value their cultures and heritage. Our teaching approaches are designed to support multilingual learners, ensuring all students thrive academically and socially.

We aim to deliver a broad, balanced curriculum so that the needs of children for whom English is an additional language are met and that pupils reach their full potential. Through careful monitoring, tracking and assessment, we support EAL children who are at risk of under-achieving through specific language interventions. 

In England, EAL learners are defined as those who have been ‘exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English’ (Department for Education, 2019).

EAL children may be:  

• Newly arrived from a foreign country and school  

• Newly arrived from a foreign country, but an English-speaking school  

• Born abroad, but moved to the UK at some point before starting school  

• Born in the UK, but in a family where the main language is not English  

• Seeking Asylum or have refugee status  

Multilingual (EAL) learners have a dual task at school: to learn English (language) and to learn through English. For this reason, our teaching aims to teach English using the mainstream curriculum as the context.  Specific teaching strategies and resources are therefore necessary to make the language of the curriculum accessible to multilingual learners as they will need varying levels of support and provision so that they can access all aspects of the curriculum. 

We use the Bell Foundation’s five principles to guide EAL pedagogy to develop and embed effective provision for our multilingual learners to ensure they thrive both academically and emotionally.