Reflection
• What do you understand ‘EAL’ to signify?
• What are your views about the maintenance and strengthening of a student’s language spoken in the home or wider community?
• How might these views, and views of other teachers, impact on school-based practices?
• How do you think EAL practices and policies might have changed in the city of York as a result of its changed demographics?
The realities of educational practices within a competitive educational system heavily reliant on terminal examinations mean that often there are very few opportunities to progress pupils’ literacy skills in one or more of the home languages. While the term EAL reflects an aspiration for maintenance and extension of students’ first languages, the predominant practices within schools and classrooms are more likely to approximate a ‘transition to English model’, which is focused primarily on the linguistic assimilation of pupils into the use of the dominant language of English.
The ‘transition to English’ approach is typified by practices where language and literacy support may be provided to immigrant pupils initially but are then withdrawn within a few years. Increasingly, in contexts of diversity there is a focus upon a push for schools to promote a shared core of ‘fundamental British values’ (DfE, 2014) where the overarching aim is to ensure that all pupils gain mastery in the dominant language of English and that students conform to the dominant social and cultural norms. This practice is associated with ‘linguistic mainstreaming’ of pupils where the intention is to ensure that pupils for whom English is an additional language are assimilated into the majority language and culture as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless, the term ‘EAL’ remains current. Schools primarily use an EAL identification of students to gather data about academic performance and to analyse how ‘EAL students’ compare with others in relation to academic attainment. Officially then, the term EAL is used to identify pupils ‘whose first language is known or believed to be other than English’, where the first language is identified as ‘the language to which a child was initially exposed during early development and continues to be exposed to this language in the home or in the community’ (DfE, 2013, p. 7).
Just as the term EAL has become somewhat dislodged from its initial conceptual roots, the continued usefulness of the term itself has recently been called into question (Wardman, 2012). The broad-brush descriptive nature of the term has been identified as being problematic. This is because the term refers to a very diverse group of learners and, as a result, it gives rise to uncertainty about the learning requirements of specific individuals or groups who may share similar literacy, educational and linguistic backgrounds. As identified by Arnot et al. (2014), those for whom English is an additional language include all of the following very different cohorts of pupils who:
• belong to very well established second or third generation ethnic minority communities where English may be one of the languages spoken at home;
• were born in the UK but whose parents arrived as economic migrants from throughout the Commonwealth;
• have moved to the country, as part of a family, as economic migrants;
• have arrived as asylum seekers or refugees fleeing turmoil in their home countries;
• have been trafficked into the country or those who are in looked-after settings.
Task 2
Frequently within school data sets, ‘EAL students’ are identified as a cohesive group. Identify the differing linguistic, cultural and ethnic groupings within your school and setting. Suggest how long individual students or groups of students may have been in the UK and reflect on the implications of your findings. Compare and contrast the differing learning requirements of individuals and groups of students with others in your setting.
Within each grouping identified above there are also important socio-cultural, geographic, linguistic, literacy and educational heritages that will influence the ways in which pupils identified as having ‘EAL’ may engage with their learning. As the linguistic diversity and ethnic backgrounds of pupils in the UK continue to increase, there are concerns that the catchall term of ‘EAL’ is overly broad and does not capture the precise nature of students’ linguistic capacities. In essence, while the application of the term EAL recognises some level of exposure to a language other than English in the home context, it provides no insight for teachers into the supposed levels of linguistic proficiency in English or any other language that students may have (Strand and Murphy, 2015, p. 2).
This poses a significant challenge for providing critical information to teachers. For example, students who may be very recent arrivals with very limited or no access to English are, for convenience sake, grouped with those who may be fluent in English and who may also have advanced literacy skills. The term ‘EAL’ is therefore far from straightforward and has become increasingly contentious. However, it would be challenging to create a term that adequately reflects the growing levels of complexity and diversity associated with the increasing heterogeneity that many schools experience.
