Strategies for New Arrivals: Secondary Teachers

Frequently Asked Questions

Compiled and written by Jennifer Costar and Louise Turner

1. What professional development can we access to help us cater for new learners of English?
   • Full staff meetings led by advisors.
   • Ongoing classroom based support provide by advisors.
   • Arrange for key teachers to attend day courses run through teacher support services. See advertisements in the Education Gazette or contact Teachers' Centres.
   • Arrange for teacher aides to attend day courses run through teacher support services.
   • Get involved in M.O.E contracts such as the Literacy and Numeracy contracts, which supports whole school development. The development covers transition to school through to planning and practice.
   • Study towards qualifications in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).
   • Arrange for bilingual people and people from a variety of cultures in the community to share their perspectives with the school
   • Build up a professional library on teaching and learning in ESOL programmes. See publications or research on ESOL Online.

2. Should we support our New Learners of English in maintenance of first language? If so how can we do this?
   • ESOL students should be encouraged in every possible way to maintain their first languages and cultures and to build on them. See The Importance of the Mother Tongue.
   • Encourage parents to participate in the school programme by sharing stories and songs from their homeland.
   • Incorporate all the schools' community languages in school newsletters, assemblies and displays.
   • Include students languages and cultures in units of work
   • Provide books and tapes in students' first languages in the library and classrooms.
   • Display artifacts and students work relating to other languages and cultures.
   • Consider placing ESOL students from the same language background together at least when they first arrive at school.
   • Encourage students to use their first languages for discussing new ideas and difficult concepts (with their parents or other students who speak that language) and for writing when appropriate at school and at home.
   • Employ bilingual teachers or teacher aides to help set up meaningful programmes that the child has some access to in the first language.

3. What localised support is available for ESOL teachers?
   • Literacy advisors.
   • Set up a small cluster group of ESOL teachers in your area, holding regular meetings to discuss practise, share resources and seek advice from your local advisory service as to who is available to come and speak to your group.

4. What is an ESOL intensive?
   • An ESOL intensive is one that provides ESOL students with the English language support and input that they need. It enables them to cope more effectively with the specific demands (in English and across the curriculum) that they are experiencing in their mainstream classes and to become more independent.
     1. Where does the intensive take place?
        • Intensives can be provided in a mainstream classroom during a class lesson or in a room set apart for language support purposes.

     2. Who teaches the intensive?
        • The teacher should be a fully qualified teacher with mainstream experience as well as ESOL qualifications and with understandings based on experience with ESOL students.
        • If the intensives are to be effective the schools' best ESOL teachers should lead them.
        • Teacher aides, while they can be very effective in supporting the teacher, should not be asked to lead intensives. To ask an untrained person to take on this complex teaching role would be unfair both to the teacher aide and to the students.

5. What resources are available?
   • There is a range of resources available.

6. I want to cater effectively for my new learner of English - where do I start?
   • Gather as much background information about the student as you can.
   • Develop an ethnic box, this box contains, for example, maps, photos and first language material.
   • Have a buddy organised preferably one who speaks the same first language.
   • Don't feel pressured to have programmes running for this student immediately.
   • Take time to get to know the student and let them settle into class routines.
   • Refer to What to do on Arrival.
   • A valuable easy to read resource is Notes to Assist you in Catering for New Arrival students who are new learners of English. Available from Kohia Teachers' Centre.