We Care About Your Privacy
By clicking “Accept all”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy.
Is it important for young English language learners to read dual language text?
It can be helpful for learners to read texts in both languages. It can provide a quick reference to aid comprehension and fosters an appreciation of the languages. It can be used creatively as a shared reading teaching tool in a bilingual setting. However, it is not a necessary part of learning the language. Often young learners will read one language and ignore the other. Additionally, if the majority language is English, this tends to reduce the desire to read in a minority language. Controversially, English quite frequently becomes the favoured language of choice due to its dominance/status in environments where English is widely used.
Graphic organisers can be a powerful tool for learners with dyslexia. They enable learners to plan and structure their ideas in a visual and accessible way. Focusing on getting ideas organised before navigating challenges with grammar and spelling can be a positive approach. The visual scaffold reduces working memory strain by keeping ideas clearly organised and structured. This allows more cognitive space for sentence construction and spelling, which might be challenging.
As well as being interesting and engaging, non-fiction texts help to develop learners’ academic vocabulary and support learning across the curriculum. Learners can use non-fiction texts to develop knowledge, retrieval, and comprehension skills, and this can be developed even further with higher level skills such as analysis and evaluation. Learners with SEND may find the bite-sized facts, clear sections and subheadings, and accompanying diagrams or illustrations in non-fiction texts less overwhelming than a longer narrative text.
The Sentence Analyser was piloted by the children and staff in the EAL Hub at Lea Forest Academy in the autumn term of 2018. Over the following two terms, the children and staff used it in a variety of ways to support a widening of the children's vocabulary. The EAL Hub children's morphology skills were tracked, alongside a control group.
What did the data show? What did the staff think? Was the resource beneficial enough to become embedded? Let's find out!