Practical Strategies for the Multilingual Classroom

A child joins Year 5 with no English and you have a lesson to teach. The instinct is to keep everything in English and wait. Yet a child who can read and write in another language has a lot to work with.

This course shows translanguaging at work in a primary school where 92% of pupils have English as an additional language and nearly 50 languages are spoken. Pupils translate key vocabulary, colour-coded so they can build it into sentences, annotate texts in their first language, and write in it while their English develops. One boy arrived with no English and, just over a year later, was writing confident stories in it, while still writing Bengali at home.

It's led by the school's EAL lead, a former ESOL lecturer, who also covers finding out what a new arrival can already do and bringing parents in through a language café.