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All learners have times where they may become less engaged or motivated with their learning. This can be for a range of reasons but learners with additional needs may face even more challenges. It is important to get to know your learners well and learn what motivates and excites them. Try to incorporate this into your lesson planning and help them to progress and reach their full potential.

Tip or Idea: Positive reinforcement is essential in helping to build confidence, self-esteem and motivation. This can range from a simple well done, to a message home or even privileges such as extra computer time! Remember to praise effort and not just results. Making mistakes is part of learning and developing.

Free resource to help you with this activity: Our Successful ways to motivate your learners checklist is full of tried and tested ways to keep your learners interested, engaged and on-track!

Further learning - Blog

A sign with 'Phonics?' on it
Created: Tue 12th Apr 2016

As educational pedagogies continue to move cyclically, with new strategies moving in and out of favour, the battle of reading approaches continues to rage on between the 3 main approaches: Synthetic Phonics, Analytical Phonics and Whole Language methods. They are often viewed on a continuum, with the Whole Language approach (Top Down method) being the least skills based and the Synthetic Phonics approach (Bottom Up method) being the most (see figure 1).

EAL learners writing
Created: Mon 15th Apr 2024

Linguists (including Derewianka (2001), Droga and Humphrey (2003), Knapp and Watkins (2005), and Gibbons (2009)) suggest that scaffolding writing is critical in helping English as an additional language (EAL) learners become effective writers. 

Mother checking child's online safety on screen
Created: Sat 27th Nov 2021

Everyone recognises the importance of staying safe online - but it's not always straightforward. For many of us, computing - including social media, information technology and cybersecurity - is a whole new world, with its own conventions and language. Now consider the added element of dealing with all of this quite literally in a different language! That's the situation our EAL learners find themselves in. Having arrived in a new country, they need to learn English as quickly as possible, for social as well as academic reasons.