Bitesize Research: Key Findings About Bilingualism

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week so far - and no doubt are looking forward to some well earned rest coming shortly! Earlier this academic year, we had a powerful keynote from the Bell Foundation about EAL learners, which has connected to our ongoing work on literacy, communication and vocabulary. As such, I was interested to see a recent Edutopia article about bilingualism  

Objectives: To bring together key findings about bilingualism. 

Summary: 

• The author highlights some of the recent key findings about bilingualism as follows:

1. Bilingualism strengthens executing functioning: As bilingual people are constantly changing between languages, they are better at multitasking and significantly more ‘grey matter’ in their brains which improves decision making, motivation and emotional regulation.  

2. Bilingualism can increase English and maths performance: There are lots of studies that show bilingual children outperform their peers in English and maths performance.

3. Bilingualism can increase earning potential and job opportunities: Bilingual employees, on average, earn 5-20% more than their monolingual counterparts. 

4. Bilingualism can prevent the negative impacts of disease and brain injury: Studies have shown that bilinguals have a better ability to recover from cognitive impairments caused by injury and that dementia had a later onset in bilingual people.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• How do I celebrate bilingualism with my students currently?

• How do I bolster the confidence of bilingual students in my classes or tutor group?

• What more would I like to know about bilingual students?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!

Teaching English to Arabic Speakers

By Greg Day

As mentioned in Jaya’s Bitesize Research this week, here at WA we teach a large proportion of students who would be classified as EAL. Of those students many speak Arabic. As someone who does not speak a second language myself, I wanted to have an understanding of the barriers that Arabic speakers face when learning English using research from the British Council.

Objectives: To understand the barriers faced by Arabic speakers when learning English and how to overcome them. 

Summary:

The key overall themes are: 

• English language is extremely important in Arabic speaking countries. The majority of the population would begin to learn English during their time at Primary school. Many students in Arabic countries also learn English outside of school through additional English lessons. Arabic nations are very diverse and so being able to use English as a common and business language is vital

• Learning English can present many challenges to Arabic speakers. For starters there is a completely different writing system as well as use of grammar. There are different rules for punctuation and so, as an example, many Arabic speakers will use a comma instead of a full stop.

• One of the main differences is that Arabic is written from right to left as opposed to left to right in English. Because of this, English will appear backwards making school textbooks seem very confusing. 

• Some English sounds are very difficult to pronounce. For example in Egypt, Arabic speakers pronounce ‘p’ and ‘b’ and ‘th’ as ‘s’ or ‘z’. These pronunciation errors do not tend to cause communication problems but can lead to some misunderstanding.

   

Tips to overcome these barriers:

• Let the student listen first. It takes time for someone who is new to English to acclimatise to the sounds. When the student is able to hear how words are pronounced correctly they will then feel more confident speaking themselves. 

• Lots of ‘drill and repeat’. Learning English for the first time requires lots of repetition and drilling, especially as the learner gets to grips with the new sounds. This is especially important when learning keywords.

• Establish classroom language early on. It can be very daunting learning a new language so keeping classroom instructions basic and using the same instructions each time will help the student understand these instructions much quicker.

Most important tip - don’t forget that the student is fluent in their own language(s)!

It’s all too easy when listening to somebody speaking broken English to forget that behind the errors and the mispronunciation is a person with cogent thoughts. They are articulate in their first language however may be struggling to communicate his or her opinions or ideas in English. This can be very frustrating for the student. Use positive praise and encourage the student to use English as much as they can and reminding them that making mistakes does not matter!

Bitesize Research: Understanding How Proficiency In English Impacts Student Progress

By Jaya Carrier

At WA, we teach a large proportion of students who would be classified as EAL. As such, new research published by the University of Oxford and Bell Foundation in March 2021 looking at proficiency in English, progress and LA variation. 

Objectives: To understand the impact of proficiency in English on student progress.

Summary:  

The key overall themes are:

• As the term ‘EAL’ represents a very broad and heterogenous group of students, this study argues that it is a blunt tool to provide meaningful information about a student’s likelihood of fulfilling their potential. This study therefore argues that the idea of ‘proficiency in English’ is the most valuable and important factor in determining the support required by different EAL learners.

• At high levels of proficiency there are positive associations between speaking more than one language and achievement. What is typically a barrier to achievement is low proficiency in the language of instruction at school.

• For most pupils, it takes up to six years for students to move from the lowest to highest level of proficiency in English. This does not seem to be impacted by the age of the child upon starting learning English, and therefore students are likely to need up to six years of support following their first learning of English. There is some variation between ethnic groups here too - wherein, minorities groups encompassing ‘White Other’ on average take longer to reach higher proficiency levels in English.

• The study also suggests that making judgements about students’ proficiency in English is more impacted by the assessor than the student themselves. Therefore, accurate, consistent assessment is necessary in order to ensure that pupils are given appropriate support to progress in proficiency in English and gain access to the curriculum.

• There is no evidence that in schools with high levels of students with low proficiency in English that academic achievement more broadly is impacted.

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• How can I work with the EAL team to support students who currently have low proficiency in English?

• Where on the 6-year journey from low to high proficiency are students you work with? How might this impact their ability to access your curricula? 

• What am I currently doing to support my EAL learners? How effective is this? What do I need in order to bring them on further?

If anyone would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.

Bitesize Research: Bilingualism

This week, in line with when we will be conducting home languages interviews, I wanted to share with you a meta-analysis focusing on the benefits incurred by bilingualism. 

Objectives: To look at the correlation between bilingualism and ‘executive function’ (namely inhibition, switching, attention, monitoring, working memory and planning) in children under the age of 18. 

Summary:  

• Overall the bilingual advantage in executive function was statistically significant

• A moderator analysis was performed to determine any other factors leading to this advantage. Socioeconomic status was discovered to be a significant factor - middle class children having a much greater advantage in executive function than their lower class counterparts. 

• Certain elements of executive function had a stronger bilingual advantage; notably attention. 

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

 

• How does this study impact our EAL learners?

• How can we seek to use this bilingual advantage that many of our students have in their attention spans?

If anyone would like to discuss this further with Jaya - please do comment below! She’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.