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Being able to understand and use a range of adjectives can help learners to communicate successfully. Adjectives are essential for adding information or interest to their spoken or written language. They also enable learners to differentiate between items.
Tip or Idea: Play ‘I spy…’ but with an adjective twist! Select an item in the classroom and choose an adjective to describe it E.g. “I spy with my little eye something fluffy!” Learners take it in turns to see if they can guess the item. If they need more support, you can add an additional adjective “I spy with my little eye something fluffy and blue”. For more confident learners try a less common adjective to challenge them.
Free resource to help you with this activity: Use our Adjective Flashcards to support learners to be the leader and choose their own item for an ‘I spy’ game.
Learners with speech and language difficulties may find it difficult to remember words or think or the word they want to use when they are talking.
Tip or Idea: Think of a category such as ‘animals’ or ‘things in a kitchen’ and then see how many words you can name. Each time you think of a word place a Lego piece on top of another and see how tall a tower you can build!
Learning Village is an invaluable tool for deaf learners with or without EAL. The use of image as the main language of instruction provides visual cues to support your learners.
Tip or Idea: Deaf learners may need to lip read or see speech physically modelled to support their understanding. Using our resources in an adult-led small group session and/or using the demo learner as a teaching tool can be very powerful for deaf learners.
English is a language which has developed over 15 hundred years and has adopted words from over 350 languages. As a result, English has a rich tapestry of vocabulary and spelling patterns which can confuse learners. Having a brief background knowledge of the historical influences on the English language can support our teaching to both first language learners and EAL learners, especially around decoding words when reading.