Understanding EAL Assessment: Best Practices for Supporting Language Learners

When it comes to supporting language learners, understanding their unique needs is essential, and assessment plays a key role in this process.  Utilising effective assessment strategies will help teachers understand how to ensure any adaptions made to classroom teaching are purposeful and effective.

“When implemented well, formative assessment practices can effectively double the speed of student learning.”

D. Wiliam, 2007

Therefore, when it comes to understanding the needs of children with EAL, we should ensure that teachers are given the best tools to not only be able to assess the child’s needs but then use this information to adapt their teaching as necessary. 

Essential Background Information on EAL Education

The DfE define EAL learners as follows:

“A pupil is recorded to have English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English.”

This definition covers a diverse group of pupils, which means that using average attainment figures for EAL groups becomes misleading. The definition focusses on language exposure rather than language proficiency. It is knowledge of the latter which will greatly improve adaptive teaching for students with EAL.

Since 2016, the DfE have collected data on the English proficiency for pupils based on a 5-point scale – yet knowledge of these categories and how this assessment informs teaching is still developing.

The 5 categories are:

• New to English
• Early Acquisition
• Developing competence
• Competent
• Fluent

ESL Assessment Explained: Key Areas of Evaluation

One of the key goals in EAL assessment is to understand the proficiency levels of the student.  Once we understand this, then we can adapt.

Language learning encompasses many different strands of language knowledge. To help demystify this process, The Bell Foundation have separated assessment into 4 language strands. These are:

1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Reading and Viewing
4. Writing

By breaking language learning into four distinct strands, teachers can gain a deeper understanding of each child’s specific strengths and areas for development and support. Children often have ‘spiky profiles’ across these areas. For example, a child can have excellent listening skills where they are demonstrating a competent level of ability, however their writing ability could still be within the early acquisition stages.  As such we can celebrate that the child has made significant progress in one of the strands, and moving forward, we can identify the most effective strategies to enhance their written skills. 

Additionally, if the child is within the early acquisition phase of speaking, then we can use this knowledge to think about what additional scaffolds need to be in place to support their development of spoken language.  Strategies to develop oracy skills will support development in this area and our blog on Establishing Effective Oracy Practice offers further guidance in this area.

In order to inform teaching, developing an understanding of the child’s ability across the 4 strands will help ensure formative assessment is ongoing and teachers know how to guide pupils to reach levels of fluency in all areas.

Building a learner profile

Understanding proficiency levels across the language domains is crucial; however, it’s equally important to create a holistic profile of the learner, as this provides a deeper insight into their overall development and current standing. This is an essential part of the EAL assessment process.

There are many variables that can influence the proficiency levels of EAL Learners so understanding more about each individual area will help to inform assessment and any additional adaptions that can be made.

The Bell Foundation suggest considering the following:

• Previous education
  • How much previous education has the EAL learner had?
  • What was the learner’s attainment at their previous school?
  • Have there been any gaps or interruptions in their education? What are typical teaching styles and expectations in the home country?

• Language and literacy practices
  • What languages are spoken at home?
  • Are these languages spoken by the EAL learner?
  • Is their first language age-appropriate – how well were they doing academically and socially in this language?

• Family background
  • Who is the EAL learner living with?
  • What is the family situation?
  • What is the level of parental support?

• Arrival situations and circumstances
  • What was the age of arrival to the UK? 
  • Is this the 1^st British school the child has attended?
  • Has the child experienced challenging circumstances or trauma?
  • Is there anything in their personal lives that might impact their learning?

Understanding the interconnected nature of languages will also help teachers to understand how easily an EAL learner may learn a new language.  In the book Teaching EAL (Multilingual Matters 2021), Robert Sharples explains how some languages are linguistically connected such as English and Dutch which means the ability to learn the 2^nd language becomes easier.  This stands in contrast to learning a 2^nd language which is linguistically distant, such as English and Mandarin. Therefore, if a child’s first language is linguistically distant to English, it can help teachers understand that the child may take longer to make connections between the two languages.

Next Steps: How to effectively support EAL Learners

Once a holistic assessment of the EAL learner has been taken, this can be used to inform teaching. Many of the best adaptions for EAL learners are actually linked to recommendations for high-quality teaching for all. 

The Oracy Commission and Reading Framework advocate for language-rich environments – this is the perfect setting and learning environment for EAL learners. Language is developed through meaningful talk, so incorporating this into everyday practice is crucial. For example, EAL learners can benefit from exposure to rich language through classroom talk, peer interactions, and collaborative learning strategies. Loewen and Sato explain that interaction is, “an indispensable component in 2nd language acquisition” (The Routledge Handbook of Instructed Second Language Acquisition, 2018). Within your classroom, think about where you can create opportunities for utilising meaningful talk and involving all learners in this task.

To further support talk, scaffolds are a crucial tool, just as they are with any learner in the classroom. Sentence stems and the pre-teaching of vocabulary provide excellent scaffolds which are low cost and can be easily adapted to the ability level of the learner. For pupils in their early acquisition stage, it may be that these sentence stems are cloze activities – whereby the child is adding in a single word to the sentence and then as they become more proficient, this can be altered to the opening sentence stem to guide learners. Sentence stems could be created into a guide for the EAL learner to help them navigate the different disciplinary languages across the curriculum.  Therefore, consider what are the key phrases required in your next maths unit, history topic or PE lesson? Share these with the EAL learner so that they build their language base and are empowered by having a means in which to engage in talk and discussions.

Following on from the theme of empowering the learner, think about the opportunities across the curriculum where the learner is encouraged to use their 1^st language during the learning process. Continuing to develop their first language is crucial for development in subsequent languages. This is an area we’ll examine in more detail in our next blog in the series, which considers whole school approaches and the importance of linguistic inclusion in our teaching. For now, think about a maths lesson – are children encouraged to initially count or use their timetables in their 1st language before translating to English? Are children able to make notes in their home language to help organise their thoughts and focus on content before translating to English? Creating space in the curriculum to value the learner’s first language will help show the value and importance of this in their learning.

Alongside using learner’s first languages in lessons, it’s important to think about how the school environment can also reflect the learner’s languages. Take a tour of the school and think about where the learner can see their language represented. Within the environment, is there evidence of dual coding? Do labels include determiners – a pencil, a book – many languages do not include determiners and therefore just the simple addition of these to labels will aid language learning. Additionally, does the learner have access to books in their language? As mentioned previously, supporting the development of an EAL learner’s first language will aid in their proficiency in English. Therefore, reviewing the book offer for learners is another step which can support EAL learners in all phases.

These are simply the starting point for supporting EAL learners at a class and whole school level.  There are further examples on The Bell Foundation’s website which is an organisation that supports children who use English as an Additional Language by providing research-based guidance, resources, and training for schools and one we are proud to be a licensed practitioner of. 

This blog is the 2nd in a series of EAL blogs which aim to support schools in developing effective strategies for supporting English as an Additional Language learners.

1. The EAL Learner
2. Assessing EAL
3. Developing a whole school approach to EAL

For more information on EAL and how we can help support your school, please contact Liz Dwarampudi, Education Consultant at liz.dwarampudi@oneeducation.co.uk