| 5 Improving the writing of students learning English as an additional language
So that student teachers ‘know to make effective personalised provision for those they teach, including those for whom English is an additional language…’, which is one of the QTS Standards, we provide a school focused project to help them address this Standard as some of our schools are unable to provide sufficient experience. This project is in collaboration with a local city school where over 40 different languages are spoken.
Stage one
The school is asked to select students from one year group who are learning English as an additional language. They collect three samples of each student’s work from across the curriculum including an English piece and at least one completed under examination conditions. The work is anonymised and the first language noted as is the number of years of learning English.
Stage two
A training session is then used to analyse the writing and to identify areas of strength as well as key areas requiring support. These are then noted on a chart and common errors identified such as subject-verb agreement, use of connectives, consistency of tense and pluralisation. A useful template that student teachers use to help them analyse students’ writing is taken from Access and Engagement in English (DfES, 2002:20).
Student teachers are then organised into groups to design one-hour workshops to support students in agreed areas based upon their findings. One group is given the remit to design an ice breaker activity for all the students and to provide an overview of the day.
Stage three
The cohort of students accompanied by teachers attended a one day conference run by the student teachers.
Outline of the day:
Aims: To help support students in developing their skills in academic writing
To introduce students to a Higher Education environment
9.30–10.00 Introductions to the day and warm up drama activities
10.00–11.00 Workshops
Plurals and spellings, connectives and complex sentences, essay structures, tenses, speech and punctuation.
11.00–11.20 Break
11.20–12.20 Workshops
Plurals and spellings, connectives and complex sentences, essay structures, tenses, speech and punctuation.
12.20–1.00 Lunch
1.00–2.00 Designing and producing posters outlining key learning
2.00–2.15 Plenary
Stage 4
Resources were produced and sent to the students as on-going support and distributed to all participating student teachers. The school valued the student teachers’ input and felt that it provided the students with knowledge, skills and confidence prior to their examinations. The student teachers felt it offered an insight to ways of supporting students for whom English is an Additional Language.
 
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