I guess because of some of the limits on our time,
EAL teachers here tend to prefer to work with staff
in planning and in developing strategies
for supporting EAL students
as opposed to team-teaching or supporting students in class.
So what's the current task that you're asking them to do?
We've got a fictitious ski trip to Mount Hotham.
A ski trip!
This is a goal for the ski trip -
to build an advertising brochure for Mount Hotham,
but tailored towards the ski trip.
In terms of where we can start to make modifications to the task,
you might be looking here with the idea of prior knowledge.
And so what do students already know?
How can they enter this task using the knowledge that they already have?
Well, since these students are in year 10,
they've already gone on school camps and school retreats
so we could easily change the trip requirements list
to one about the school retreat or the school camp.
So do they have to create the text in this case?
On the second page here, we've got some sample text that they can use,
although some of them will decide to change that and do different things.
We're going to work together
and find ways to try and connect the content of that work
to the students' understanding and prior knowledge
and also different ways of supporting the language demands on the students.
One of the things that we're often saying to teachers
is, "You know when you're at uni and stuff,
"you don't actually have to go to the library
"and choose all your own readings.
"You often get a reading list."
So it's perfectly reasonable to provide students
with something like a text bank or an image bank.
EAL Teaching and Learning Cycle
is something that is a very useful tool for mainstream teachers,
particularly because most tasks
require students to produce some kind of text
and so we know that we can support students' learning of content
through the building field phase.
We know that students learn well
when they understand what's being asked.
So when they can see a model,
they can start to break it down into parts
and understand what they have to do.
You know, all of this stuff,
the idea of an image bank and a text bank,
will probably fit into building field -
that they're becoming familiar with ideas, images, words
around what they're working on.
And then, again, little group discussions
would be a good way of tearing those apart
and seeing what's going on.
Yeah, this idea of deconstruction -
so somehow you have to get
from looking at the brochure as a single text
to the parts of it - what are the parts?
I found that session with Mei really useful
to stop and think about what exactly is important in the task
and what we are expecting the students to know
and really go through that explicitly
because it's easy to just assume certain things
and not really think about
what you're asking the students to already bring with them.
So working through and explicitly doing all that
is quite enlightening to clarify what it is that you're doing.
In this session with Alistair,
we, I guess, developed a plan
to help build the field through image and text banks
to help with the modelling and deconstruction
through finding some examples that students can use
and a plan for how students might construct something together
and then individually produce their brochures.
But I think there's another layer to this
and that's about the strategies
that Alistair might use in his classroom along the way
as he's going through all these phases with the students.
So I would like to work with him next
to have a look at the EALD teacher resource,
which has been released by ACARA
to support mainstream teachers with EAL students in their classes
and I think we can use that to find some particular...
Identify some needs of students
and have a look at some of the strategies
that he can use in his classroom.