Focus Area 1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds

Demonstrate knowledge of teaching strategies that are responsive to the learning strengths and needs of students from diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Focus Area 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of strategies for differentiating teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.

In 2021 volunteered at my local state secondary school in the Intensive English class catering to EAL/D students from years 7 to 12. Most students in the class have refugee backgrounds and limited, severely interrupted education (1.3).  The activities I conducted with individual students vary, depending on the length of time they have been at school in Australia, their oral language skills, confidence, reading progression and year level. Most of these students only have oral literacy in their first language, have low general and cultural knowledge and limited skills using digital technologies (1.5). Recently the students went on an excursion to the cinema, providing the opportunity to incorporate real-world oral language and reading skills with practical experiences that promote intercultural understanding (ACARA, 2014). We talked and wrote about the experience in a range of literacy activities in class afterwards.

A key focus of my work in this class was oral language development because oral language is a precursor to literacy and reading (Snow, 2018). Giving students an immersive opportunity to speak English enhances their cognitive development, language learning, reading comprehension and writing skills (1.3) (Wise et al, 2007; ACARA, 2014). Therefore, my lesson commenced with a class discussion about the excursion to the cinema. This was a highly structured activity aimed at maximising student talk time (de Courcy & Farndale, 2017) using a familiar conversational framework used frequently for this class: When, what, where, who, how/why? (1.3) (Artefact 1.1). Highly scaffolded and familiar organisers such as this assist students of varying English ability to readily understand the task (Marzano & For, 2007) and focus on improving their vocabulary and oral and written responses each week (1.5). I wrote these words on the whiteboard and asked the students to read them out one by one as a group to warm up in a non-threatening way and get them speaking English immediately (ACARA, 2014). We then went back to the first word (e.g. When?) and I threw a squishy ball to one of the students and they answered the question verbally, which I then wrote on the board after checking with the class whether the response was correct. This active group activity is fun, suited to the age group and promotes group cohesion and social development (Caskey & Anfara, 2014). A vocabulary bubble was created for new, difficult, or unfamiliar words, which is a strategy to help EAL/D students to build knowledge of both concepts and words (1.5) (Artefact 1.2). Vocabulary depth is a reliable predictor of literacy success; therefore, it is very important to focus on spoken and written vocabulary development in the EAL/D classroom (ACARA, 2014).

Using gradual release of responsibility (Fisher & Frey, 2013), after completion of the When, what, where, who, how/why? questions on the board, students were then instructed to work in small year-level groups (2-3 students) to write their own paragraph about the excursion to the cinema. Small groups maximise student talk time and allow for extra thinking and pair-work exploration (de Courcy & Farndale, 2017). This “Scaffolding writing using the curriculum cycle” approach is recommended to help students make connections between speaking, listening, writing, and reading (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria, 2019). In this class, year level generally corresponds with English ability, so older students were challenged to write compound sentences containing two ideas to convey more information about the experience (1.5). Older students were also instructed to use the paragraph checklist (Artefact 1.3) to ensure their writing contained correct formatting and punctuation (1.5).

Because this class was a dedicated EAL/D literacy class, all my attention could be focused on English language development. When I am a graduate teacher, I am likely to be teaching mainstream English but have EAL/D students in my class. The challenge in meeting APST 1.5 in this context will be to differentiate my instruction to cater for the needs of the EAL/D students in my class. This will require me to consider:

Content and Process considerations:

Scaffolding and support strategies: modelling the writing cycle as I have done in the example provided and providing text frameworks, sentence prompts, writing guides and glossaries; providing visual supports and gestures for key words/concepts; referring to familiar stories or events (Policastro et al., 2019).

Communication: monitoring my language to ensure it is appropriate to their English level; providing alternative oral explanations; simplifying language and avoiding colloquialisms or idioms (Pozas et al., 2019).

Product differentiation:

Modifying tasks and assessments for understanding, English expression ability and allowing more time (Tomlinson, 2005; ACARA, 2014).