[eal-bilingual] influence of first language

Activities in curriculum context such as hot seating, two minute 
autobiographies and sorting are well suited and can be tailored to 
practice  modal verb, subject verb agreement, pronouns and comparative 
phrases. I'll be getting a lot more of these online soon as a result of 
the literature and science workshops we have been running. 
Stuart 
PS Don't forget our poetry workshop on 22nd May which is filling fast. 
Does anyone want to host a humanities workshop (KS2/3) in June or  
July? Kate Moorse (who was history person at QCA till very recently) is 
working with me to plan this.

----Original Message----
From: catharine.driver at btinternet.com
Date: Mar 19, 2007 19:39 
To: "For practitioners involved in teaching pupils from ethnic and 
linguistic minorities"<eal-bilingual at lists.becta.org.uk>
Subj: Re: [eal-bilingual] influence of first language

I'd concentrate on errors that intefere with meaning most of all. I 
also think that grammar  is best taught in context, rather than from a 
book of exercises. [though I know that some students do like to have a 
book to take home with them.] 
  This is my list of key priorities for more advanced EAL learners

   Verbs, especially all past tenses and modal verbs.  
   Subject-verb agreements  
   Comparative phrases  
   Pronoun reference  
   Articles/uncountables  
   Choice of prepositions [including phrasal verbs] 
  Some of these errors are ' noticing ' problems, and can be checked 
through proof reading activities. E.g. checking pronoun referencing, 
subject /verb agreement.

  Others are ' learning' problems e.g. using the article/plurals if 
you speak a language that doesn't have them. Using a wider variety of 
past tenses accurately.

  For verbs, I use timelines and visuals to show sequence of events 
etc. For comparative phrases I ask students to learn some set phrases 
and practice using them again and again.
  Prepositions + verbs are essentially a matter of vocab learning. Try 
'translating' phrases into the latinate equivalent which may be easier 
to remember.  [e.g. get out of = extricate, extract ]

  Very few GCSE questions [ apart from English obviously] actually 
require perfect grammatical English. You could also try sharing this 
list with other subject teachers to help reinforce things across the 
curriculum a bit more.
  Catharine

Janet Storey <janet_storey at btinternet.com> wrote:
  Help! 

Has anyone got any suggestions on how to help older EAL pupils 
erradicate errors resulting from the influence of first language in 
extended writing eg. missing final "s", missing articles, problems with 
tenses, spelling? 

If not what would you give priority to when helping them improve 
writing tasks?

Thanks

Janet Storey
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