Reply To: EAL or SEND?

[Catherine]

I too have been asked to cover EAL and am very aware how an EAL student will learn the new language very differently if s/he has a leanring difficulty too. Name SEND can impact on EAL acquisition. I live in Cyprus and though I work in a private English school I have found it interesting that State (greek) schools have selected certain of their schools to be mainly for GAL (Greek as another language) so that there is a heavy emphasis on teaching the mainstream langauge for foreigners. When they are sufficiently fluent, they transfer inot mainstream.
I used to work in and EAL Institue and my role was precisley teaching English to chidlren with learning dififculties. I used the mainstream porgram but adapted it to place a BIG emphasis on phonics, a BIG emphasis on vocab acquisition and a BIG emphasis on tenses.