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Getting behaviour 'right' is crucially important for all schools. Ensuring that we have a 'fit for purpose' behaviour policy that caters for all pupils throughout their schooling - including EAL pupils - is vital for the feel and culture of our schools, as well as for allowing pupils to feel safe and be in the right environment to learn to their full potential.
As we all know - and as a quick Google search will tell us - different countries have different expectations for their pupils. Expectations that may differ from country to country (to name just a few) include elements such as:
For example, when showing that they are listening to a teacher in a class conversation, some pupils may have been taught to cross their arms, while other pupils may look down as a sign of respect, and others may have been trained to track the teacher to demonstrate active listening.
When we are designing and realising our behaviour policies, it is important to be mindful of our EAL pupils. With pupils joining us from an array of different backgrounds and cultures, with different expectations and experiences of norms of acceptable behaviour in schools and towards teachers, how do we create a fair and enforceable behaviour policy? And how do we unpack this policy for our pupils, so that they can be fully functioning and happy participants in class and in the school community as a whole?
With all the minutiae and variants of responses and behaviours that pupils can show and experience, it is not surprising that arriving at a school can be overwhelming and confusing for new pupils. That is why it is vitally important that we spend time unpacking behaviour policies, empathising with pupils and pre-empting things that may go wrong, as well as modelling and emphasising those behaviours that we do want to see.
Here are a few ideas of some practical actions that we can take to support our EAL pupils when thinking about acceptable behaviour:
You can download a template for a behaviour chart with space for translation by clicking on the buttons at the top or bottom of this article.
These are just some of the many ways that we can unpack our behaviour policies for our EAL pupils, and scaffold positive behaviour in school. Using images and translation, we can make our expectations clear, and help new arrivals navigate the often confusing school environment, to reach their full learning potential.
References:
Cowley, S. (2001). Getting the buggers to behave. London, Continuum
Scott, C. (2020). An English as an Additional Language Programme: Learning through images for 7-14-year-olds. Abingdon: Routledge
Scott, C. (2012). Teaching English as an Additional Language 5-11: A Whole School Resource. Abingdon: Routledge
Worth, D. (2021). ‘Creating behaviour policies in multicultural settings’, TES, Viewed 20th November, 2021, access here
Barry and Matthew Carpenter’s ‘Recovery Curriculum’ has many applications for EAL pupils. Their ‘Recovery Curriculum’ was created during the 2021-21 pandemic, over concerns about how learners would cope when back in school. The Carpenters describe how the Recovery Curriculum is built on five levers, “as a systematic, relationships-based approach to reigniting the flame of learning in each child” (Carpenter and Carpenter, 2020).
Cloze procedures are tasks where learners fill in the blanks in a text from which entire words have been omitted. Learners decide on the most appropriate words to fill the gaps from a bank of provided words. The word 'cloze' (close) is derived from the word 'closure', whereby participants complete a not quite finished pattern or text by inserting or choosing words to give the text closure (Walter, 1974).
Effective assessment for learning (AfL) is ‘informed feedback to pupils about their work’ (Shaw, 1998). As Broadfoot et al (1999) discuss, there are five key ways in which we can enhance learning by assessment. These steps can be universally applied to all learning and all learners, and thus address the learning needs of EAL learners in physical and virtual classrooms. They are: