The focus of this one day course presented by Kathy Rushton and Joanne Rossbridge is to develop understandings and strategies for participants who support EAL/D students in both small groups and mainstream classrooms.
Practical strategies will be provided to foster the use of English language while encouraging students to use all the linguistic resources that they bring to school, including the use of their first language. Consideration will be given to the wellbeing framework and supporting students in an inclusive environment which honours and confirms their identity, language, and culture.
Participants will:
Extend their knowledge, skills and understanding in the development of oral language with links to the mode continuum to support English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) students.
Explore the relationship between spoken and written language through unpacking lexical density and grammatical intricacy
Engage in activities to expand their strategies to develop a reading sequence with consideration of Field, Tenor and Mode, vocabulary and language features
Engage in activities showcasing strategies in developing a ‘tanslanguaging space’ to support literacy.
Extend their understanding on the role of joint construction in the teaching and learning cycle.
20 August 2024 at AEU ACT Branch, Level 1/71 Leichhardt St, Kingston ACT 2604
29 October 2024 2024 at AEU ACT Branch, Level 1/71 Leichhardt St, Kingston ACT 2604
Completing Tell Me Your Story: Supporting EAL/D students in language and literacy development will contribute 5 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Accredited PD in the priority area of Delivery and Assessment of NSW Curriculum/EYLF addressing standard descriptors 1.3.2, 2.5.2 & 3.3.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.
$220
Joanne Rossbridge is an independent language and literacy consultant working in both primary and secondary schools and with teachers across Australia. She has worked as a classroom teacher and literacy consultant with the DET (NSW). Her expertise and much of her experience is in working with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Joanne is particularly interested in student and teacher talk and how talk about language can assist the development of language and literacy.
Kathy Rushton is interested in the development of language and literacy especially in disadvantaged communities. She has worked as a classroom teacher and literacy consultant and provides professional learning for teachers in the areas of language and literacy development. Her current research projects include a study of multilingual pre-service teachers and the impact that teacher professional learning has on the development of a creative pedagogical stance which supports translanguaging and student identity and wellbeing.
Primary and Secondary teachers who support EAL/D students in both small groups and mainstream classrooms.
Professor Megan Watkins and Professor Greg Noble present a research-based examination of the complexities involved in working with students of refugee backgrounds in our schools. They discuss why it is both inherently difficult and necessary for NSW public school teachers to strive to meet the needs of these students and their families . . .
In mid-2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated the total number of refugees world-wide was 27.1 million (Refugee Council of Australia, 2022). This number has risen dramatically in recent years due to the increasing number and intensity of conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia, forcing many to flee their homelands and seek safety elsewhere. Many of these refugees are under 18 years old, and many are unaccompanied minors. While Australia’s proportion of this number is relatively low, thousands of young refugees (Refugee Council of Australia, 2017) enter Australia each year on humanitarian visas and face the daunting prospect of beginning school in their newfound home with limited or no English, limited or no literacy in their first language, disrupted or no previous schooling, and the scars of trauma resulting from the experiences of war, the death of loved ones, poverty and protracted periods of displacement in refugee camps and/or one or more countries of transit (Yak, 2016). Once settled, many may be under pressure to earn an income or to help other members of their family, which affects their attendance and progress at school (Refugee Council of Australia, 2016). In addition to contending with these difficulties, issues around gender, faith and racism may affect their capacity to ‘fit in’ (Yak, 2016).
The New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education (DoE) now records that there are more than 11,000 students of refugee backgrounds in NSW schools (NSW DoE, 2020). While many of these students are located in metropolitan Sydney, in particular in the western and south-western suburbs, there is an increasing number settling in regional areas, posing considerable challenges for schools and their communities to ensure that these students’ complex needs are met. Schools are often the first point of contact with wider Australian society for young refugees, so how schools position and serve them has enormous consequences (Uptin et al., 2013).
Various community, government and non-government organisations have provided considerable assistance to schools, but a number of studies suggest that not only is far more needed (Sidhu et al., 2011; Block et al., 2014), but that further research is required to gauge refugee students’ experiences of schooling and whether current practice is addressing their needs and those of teachers (Ferfolja and Vickers, 2010).
In 2019, the NSW Teachers Federation commissioned researchers at Western Sydney University to undertake such a study to help fill this gap and to yield data to inform how they may best support teachers working in these complex environments. The report, It’s Complex! Working with Students of Refugee Backgrounds and their Families in New South Wales Schools, (Watkins, M., Noble, G., & Wong, A. ,2019) is the product of this research. Its title, drawn from a comment made by one of the teacher participants, reflects not only the complex needs of refugee students and their families but the inherent complexity of meeting these needs often within schools already grappling with the challenges of socio-economic disadvantage, increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and students with physical and intellectual disabilities. Meeting the needs of students of refugee backgrounds is undertaken alongside those of other students, making the task for teachers a complex one indeed.
It’s Complex aimed to capture this complexity. The research informing the report included interviews and focus groups with executive staff and teachers, students with and without refugee backgrounds and the parents or carers of students of refugee backgrounds in ten public schools. These schools included primary schools, high schools and Intensive English Centres (IECs) in Sydney and regional locations in NSW, with high and low populations of students of refugee backgrounds and varying numbers of students with a Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE) amongst their broader populations. The study also involved observations in classrooms, playgrounds and at school community events. In addition to school-derived data, interviews were also held with relevant personnel in organisations supporting refugee students and their families.
The study examined the challenges faced by school communities as a result of their increasing number of students of refugee backgrounds. It looked at the educational and broader needs of these students; the programs in place to support them within schools; the links between educational experiences and other aspects of the settlement process and the social contexts in which settlement occurs; the consequences for teacher workloads and their professional capacities; and a range of other issues. This article provides a broad overview of the project’s key findings with a link here to the full report for more detailed examination of these from the perspectives of each of the various informant groups that participated in the study.
One of thekey findings of the research was that the needs of students of refugee backgrounds are not simply the pragmatic requirements of educational performance, these students also have complex linguistic, social, cultural, psychological and economic needs. In discussion with principals and other senior executive across the 10 project schools, the area of greatest need identified was that of welfare, not only ensuring students were fed, housed and felt safe but that there was support for those who experienced psychological trauma as, without addressing this, it was considered difficult for students’ educational needs to be met. Yet these respondents also stressed the highly individualised nature of these students’ needs with one teacher remarking: ‘all refugee students struggle but struggle in different ways. We have very capable students, students that have, you know, not as much capacity to learn as others. And some are very bright – a full range of learners’.
While not news to school executive and teachers, the research revealed how schools aremuch more than educational institutions. This may have always been the case, but with increasing and diversifying refugee intakes, they have become complex sites of refugee and community support, with greater expectations and challenges. As one principal commented: ‘I guess we are kind of, we have almost become a community centre, and this is something that I find quite challenging … So, we get a lot of requests that are far removed from our brief as a school’. Schools, therefore, are grappling with a range of issues that result from these greater expectations: teacher workload, professional learning, funding issues, interagency coordination and community liaison.
The research also found that there were uneven levels of expertise and support across schools, both by region and by type, and related to school and community contexts, and individual teacher’s experiences. There are schools, such as IECs, which are set up well to meet these challenges, developing significant banks of expertise and resources, and there are schools which, by dint of their location and demographics, are not well set-up nor well-funded.
Many teachers are providing additional support beyond the classroom in terms of arranging homework clubs, extra work, support services, community liaison, etc, creating increased and intensified workloads which have stressful consequences for work-life balance and some teachers’ mental health. Many teachers are providing this extra support but with varying degrees of experience and expertise. Many do not have English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) qualifications, for example, exacerbating the stressful circumstances in which they are working. Many are also finding themselves in classrooms with an increasing complexity of student populations, posing challenges for classroom teaching.
This was matched with very uneven levels of understanding in schools – amongst teachers, non-refugee students and the wider community – of the complex experiences and challenges faced by students of refugee backgrounds. Staff in schools often struggled to ‘get the right balance’ between addressing the pastoral, the academic and the socio-cultural needs of students of refugee backgrounds with huge implications for these students’ learning. One executive staff member reflected on the problem of an overemphasis on the pastoral:
“I think that when we are dealing with our students one-on-one and we start to hear and get to know them more and hear the history of where they have come from and their trauma, there can be a bit of a tendency to make excuses for them not improving academically and as strongly as they could and … I am going to use the word ’pity’, like there can be an element not from all teachers but from some teachers.”
An executive member at another school suggested such an approach raised questions about the nature of wellbeing itself: ‘So, it is striking that balance between wellbeing as welfare and wellbeing as self-esteem and achievement’.
As a consequence, students of refugee backgrounds have very varied educational experiences: some are settling well, and some are not ‘fitting in’. While most value the efforts undertaken at their schools, as do their parents and carers, many are also suffering from a lack of support. These students are also faced with the dilemma of in\visibility: they often stand out – for various reasons – but their needs are often ‘invisible’, and they can fall through cracks in the system. Many students recounted the enormous challenges of English language and literacy acquisition and often felt underprepared for their educational experiences. Many students continued to experience enormous problems in the transition from IECs to high school and there appeared little progress in addressing these issues, despite being well documented in previous research (Hammond, 2014).
Many students of refugee backgrounds reported the ongoing incidence of racism, though this is not always acknowledged by staff in schools. This racism varied in scale and type from microaggressions of other students avoiding contact and making veiled derogatory comments, to forms of structural racism often resulting from well-intentioned programs that actually reinforced these students’ lack of belonging. In one example of the former, in a school with a predominantly Anglo-Australian student population attended by a small number of refugee students of African backgrounds, a teacher referred to students making racist taunts in the form of ‘back door kind of comments’. The teacher explained how students would say: ‘So, they are asking for a black pen, like they will disguise the racism and emphasise certain things like, “Can I have a black pen?” or something like that. Whereas I shut that down immediately’.
While schools provided various forms of assistance, many continued to struggle with developing and sustaining productive relations with parents of refugee backgrounds and their wider communities.
The work of Refugee Support Leaders (RSLs), a temporary measure introduced in response to the arrival of large numbers of Syrian refugees in 2016, proved increasingly important in many schools and their broader communities. RSLs took up roles in the wake of the loss of the NSW Department of Education Multicultural Education/EAL/D consultants that occurred in 2012, a loss which has been detrimental for many schools. A pleasing development, following the publication of It’s Complex, and because of the NSW Teachers Federation’s advocacy, has been the appointment of EAL/D Leader roles seemingly filling the void of the previous Multicultural Education/EAL/D consultants. These are much needed positions which, it is hoped, are ongoing, supporting schools in meeting the EAL/D needs of not only refugee students, but the many students who require specialist EAL/D teaching.
Finally, while much work has been done to address issues around the coordination of governmental and non-governmental agencies in the area of refugee settlement, this has not always been embedded well in daily practice in schools. For this work to be consolidated and extended we must enable multiple, critical conversations – between the Department, support organisations and schools; between teachers, students, parents/carers and their wider communities – around students’ educational, pastoral and social needs, and the capacities of schools to address them. Failure to facilitate such dialogue will threaten the stability of life that students of refugee backgrounds and their families so urgently need.
A useful starting point will be looking at the full report, which can be found at:
If you are interested in applying to the It’s Complex: Working with students of refugee backgrounds in NSW public schools professional learning course run by the Centre for Professional Learning, please click here.
Block, K., Cross, S., Riggs, E. and Gibbs, L. (2014). Supporting schools to create an inclusive environment for refugee students. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 18(12), 1337-1355.
Ferfolja, T. and Vickers, M. (2010). Supporting refugee students in school education in Greater Western Sydney. Critical Studies in Education, 51(2), 149-162.
Hammond, J. (2014). The transition of refugee students from Intensive English Centres to mainstream high schools: Current practices and future possibilities. Sydney: NSW Department of Education and Communities.
New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education (DoE)(2020) Supporting Refugee Students https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/multicultural-education/refugee-students-in-schools.
Sidhu, R., Taylor, S. and Christie, P. (2011). Schooling and Refugees: Engaging with the complex trajectories of globalisation. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(2), 92-103.
Uptin, J., Wright, J. and Harwood, V. (2013). ‘It felt like I was black dot on white paper’: examining young former refugees’ experience of entering Australian high schools. Australian Educational Researcher, 40(1), 125-137.
Watkins, M., Noble, G., & Wong, A. (2019). It’s Complex: Working with students of refugee backgrounds and their families in New South Wales public schools (2nd ed.). NSW Teachers Federation.
Megan Watkins is Professor in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. Her research interests lie in the cultural analysis of education exploring the impact of cultural diversity on schooling and the ways in which different cultural practices can engender divergent habits and dispositions to learning. Megan began her career as an English/History teacher working in high schools in Western Sydney. Her most recent book is Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World: Critical Perspectives on Multicultural Education (Bloomsbury, 2021) with Greg Noble.
Greg Noble is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Greg has been involved in research in multiculturalism and education for thirty years. His interests have centred around the relations between youth, ethnicity, gender and schooling, as well as aspects of curriculum and pedagogy in multicultural education. He also has broader research interests in issues of migration, ethnic communities and intercultural relations. He has published eleven books, including: Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World (2021) and Disposed to Learn (2013), both with Megan Watkins, and Cultures of Schooling (1990).
Cindy Valdez explores some of the strategies that help to support English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners in your classrooms. Ensuring that EAL/D students feel included in the classroom helps to address their academic and emotional needs. . .
“The [Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education] Declaration has two distinct but interconnected goals:
Goal 1: The Australian education system promotes excellence and equity
Goal 2: All young Australians become:
• confident and creative individuals
• successful lifelong learners
• active and informed members of the community.
Achieving these education goals is the responsibility of Australian Governments and the education community in partnership with young Australians, their families and carers and the broader community. “(Education Council, 2019)
In line with this policy, my vision for all students, regardless of their backgrounds, is that they be included in their classroom lessons, and they are able to access the Australian Curriculum, so that every student feels that they have a rightful place in their learning environments. A student, regardless of their race, socio-economic background, physical or intellectual ability should be able to be part of any classroom and receive the quality education that they deserve and are entitled to. It may be a challenge, but it is achievable. During planning and programming sessions, my role as the English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) Specialist teacher/mentor has been to ask my colleagues to reflect upon the following questions. In this paper I pose the same questions with my responses.
“How do I ensure that each student feels that they belong and is included in my classroom?”
‘Belonging’ and ‘inclusivity’ could mean different things to different people. Some would say that it means that each child is ‘heard’ or ‘seen’, that their thoughts and views are valued. Others would say that each child feels that they ‘fit’ in, or that they ‘get along’ with everyone in the classroom. Whatever it is, there’s a general consensus that to feel ‘included’ means that your contributions are valued; you are allowed to have, and to express, your own opinions; you are treated with kindness and respect; and last, but not least, you are seen as a ‘worthy conversational partner’ by your peers.
For me, there is another ‘layer’ to being ‘included’ and ‘belonging’ in the classroom. That is, that each individual is seen as part of a ‘community of practice‘. In a recent article I read, “Scaffolding Practice: Supporting Emerging Bilinguals’ Academic Language
Use in Two Classroom Communities” (Pacheco, M., Shannon, D. & Pray, L. (2017). the authors described this practice as:
“…community-focused, language-as-practice perspective of academic language builds from the foundation that a classroom is a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), or a group of individuals that engage one another with shared resources to work toward common goals. With this perspective, we frame academic language as practices, or the different ways that
students and teachers use language to participate in activities that are recognized and valued by other community members”
(Pacheco, M., Shannon, D. & Pray, L. p.65, 2017).
How do I design learning experiences that are ‘intellectually challenging’ (Dufficy, 2005) for my students?
As we need to engage our EAL/D learners in learning that involves higher order thinking, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving, teachers need to: make decisions about the ‘BIG IDEA’ that we want all students to know about and understand; formulate ‘essential questions’ so that all students know ‘why’ we are learning what we are learning about; and design a ‘rich task’ to consolidate and demonstrate new learnings.
EAL/D learners will greatly benefit from participating in High Challenge/High Support programs. These programs aim for deep knowledge and deep learning, whilst providing EAL/D learners with high levels of targeted support via two aspects of scaffolding: ‘designed-in scaffolding’ (carefully planned sequence of learning experiences), and ‘contingentscaffolding’ (point of need teaching). (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005).
In a classroom where a ‘community of practice’ is evident, both teacher and student scaffold the academic language in order for everyone to be able to participate in meaningful and purposeful classroom talk. We often push our EAL/D learners towards being able to justify, describe and explain their thinking because as we know “academic language is not something that a student does or does not have, but a practice that a student does” (Pacheco, M et al, 2016, p. 65).
We must clarify our students’ thinking by asking questions to ‘extend’ the talk in an attempt to engage them in substantive conversations, “which could include attention to language atthe vocabulary, syntax, and discourse levels.” (Pacheco, M. et al, 2017 p. 65) In a “community of practice”,the students will also extend the talk of their peers because the teacher has modelled the language.
How do I scaffold EAL/D learners’ use of academic language and participation in class discussions?
EAL/D learners need to access all curriculum areas, access age-appropriate quality reading materials and access the academic language demands of every subject. This includes, for example, words with different shades of meaning, subject-specific vocabulary/language, scientific language and so forth.
How do you ensure that students are thinking, talking and writing like scientists, historians, geographers, authors, artists or mathematicians?
There are language and cultural implications for each subject that need to beconsidered. That is, EAL/D teachers need to consider the language demands specific for each subject by knowingthe language structures, grammatical features and vocabulary development which need to be targeted and explicitlytaught.
Using History as the example, Paul Dufficy explains that when teaching History “…an important goal is to assist young people to become historians – to appropriate the texts, the ways and the dispositions of history and historians…in the process of becoming historians, children and young people are, potentially, becoming critical, fair-minded, optimistic, curious, courageous, and angered by injustice” (Paul Dufficy, 2005 p. 41).
How do I ensure that everyone is included in EVERY lesson that I teach? How am I differentiating the curriculum so that all experience SUCCESS?
EAL/D learners need to be able to make connections to what they are learning about. Can they see their own culture and values in the unit of work? If not, how can we bring their ‘cultural capital’ into the curriculum? How do we ensure the learning is relevant to our EAL/D students? The goal is substantive engagement, not compliance and completion of busy work. Both the Learning Intention and Success Criteria need to be made visible to EAL/D learners so that they succeed in completing an open-ended rich task throughout the unit of work.
What do I want my students to THINK about?
Teachers need to know their subject area, and the ‘why’ of the unit of work. Prioritise learning outcomes and take the ‘slow teaching’ approach.It’s not about ticking all the boxes, rather it’s about taking the time to design ‘deep’ learning and careful consideration given to what meaningful learning needs to happen in during each lesson.
What BIG IDEAS do I want them to learn and understand?
Deconstruct the ‘big idea’, focus question, essential questions and the ‘why’ with your learners. The ‘big idea’ is what you want your students to think and learn about. It could be written up as a question. For example – to understand ‘characterisation’: “How do authors use emotive language and impactful noun groups to create characters that are believable?” This could then be deconstructed by unpacking the vocabulary words necessary to understand the question. To ensure that everyone is on the same page.
How do I design and sequence the learning?
· Backward map from the rich task so you know the end to plan ahead! Decide on the order in which you would like to tackle the unit. What do my students need to learn about first to achieve the learning outcome? Stage teams will find that this could look different in each class.
· Frontload the vocabulary by selecting, highlighting and bringing to students’ attention key words, that are pertinent to understanding the text they’re about to read, view or listen to.
· Visible thinking routines. Find ways to make your students’ thinking visible by engaging in various visible thinking routines such as ‘see, think, wonder’, ‘beginning, middle, end’ and ‘What makes you say that?’ to name a few. (Click here for the link to Harvard University’s Project Zero)
· Message abundancy. EAL/D learners need to hear, see and use target language multiple times and in many different ways (i.e. message abundancy). Design learning activities that require all students to talk to complete learning tasks by, for example, engaging in visible thinking routines and communicative activities to use the target language/vocabulary.
· Know thy students! Give your EAL/D learners timely feedback on both content and language learning. Let them know how they are going with acquiring the English language in their speaking, listening, reading/responding and writing. Both the ESL Scales & EAL/D Progression will assist in this process.Click here for more information
Make their learningvisible, for example, goal setting, wall charts, conferencing, and so forth. As well, plan for engaging ways for students to demonstrate their learning through, for example, the creation of an artwork.
· Create your own resources to link with the current unit of work. Create your own modelled texts as sometimes ‘rich’ and age-appropriate reading material is hard to find so as a team, collaboratively construct your own. Be mindful not to simplify the language too much as the inclusion of target and subject-specific vocabulary is a must! Learners of English will not learn the academic language unless they are exposed to it. Create other resources such as word/picture/meaning matching cards, cloze activities, ranking activities, margin questions (which may need to be read to your newly arrived students, and translated if possible).
Learning a new language is best acquired in an inclusive environment where each person feels safe to flourish in. An environment where a community of practice comprised of students and their teachers who all feel safe to take risks, understand that learning is messy, value connections, nurture respectful relationships, and understand that learning is best achieved when ‘we’re all in it together’.
Dufficy, P. (2005). Designing learning for diverse classrooms. Newtown: Primary Teaching Association Australia.
The Education Council (2019) The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration
Pacheco, M., Shannon D., & Pray, L. (2017). Scaffolding Practice: Supporting Emerging Bilinguals’ Academic Language Use in Two Classroom Communities. Language Arts, 95 (2), 63-76.
Readings and resources:
Hammond . J., (2012) “Hope and challenge in The Australian Curriculum: Implications for EAL students and their teachers” The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
Cindy Valdez has been an EAL/D specialist for over 20 years. She has predominantly worked in south-west Sydney and is passionate about inclusion, developing others as leaders in the EAL/D space, and catering for the academic and wellbeing needs of EAL/D learners, including students from refugee backgrounds.
Cindy led various action learning projects during her role as a Refugee Support Leader in 2017-2019. She is currently an EAL/D Education Leader at the NSW Department of Education, and President of the Association for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ATESOL) NSW.
If you wish to apply to attend a single day of this three-day course, please email us at cpl@nswtf.org.au
We will focus on oral language development as the basis for developing literacy through the cyclical use of a range of strategies. This will be achieved through consideration of how students need to make meaning in curriculum contexts with a particular emphasis on developing knowledge about language, particularly grammar and vocabulary.
The focus of this three day course presented by Kathy Rushton and Joanne Rossbridge is to develop understandings and strategies for participants who support EAL/D students in both small groups and mainstream classrooms.
Practical strategies will be provided to foster the use of English Language (L2) while encouraging students to use all the linguistic resources that they bring to school, including the use of their first language (L1). Consideration will be given to the wellbeing framework and supporting students in an inclusive environment which honours and confirms their identity, language, and culture.
Open All
Surry Hills (3 Days, Term 4)
Day 1 – Friday 1 November 2024
Day 2 – Friday 15 November 2024
Day 3 – Friday 29 November 2024
Federation House
23-33 Mary St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010
Day 1 – Speaking and Listening
Principles of second language learning
Lexical density and grammatical intricacy: The relationship between grammar and vocabulary development
The Mode Continuum
Elaborated and restricted codes and the relationship between L1 and L2
Strategies for developing oral language through planning and the cyclical use of range of activities, e.g. communicative activities, group work, drama, rhymes, chants, poems. Link back to the mode continuum.
Select a picture book and, based on today’s session, prepare strategies. Explanation of task for Session 2.
Day 2 – Reading
Introduction of Field, Tenor and Mode.
Before, during and after reading and in preparation for writing with a focus on: – field building activities to acknowledge and build on cultural knowledge (before) – intonation, pronunciation, punctuation and spelling (during) – inferential comprehension (after)
Strategies for categorising vocabulary and working with language features
Share strategies for selected picture book with a small group
Explanation of task for Session 3.
Day 3 – Writing
The teaching and learning cycle
Identifying strategies for developing writing through a joint construction.
Strategies for supporting written like text, eg Readers Theatre, Dictogloss, Running dictation, Advance /Detail
Making links to the community through writing for a purpose
Prepare notes for the joint construction of a Literary Recount and an Exposition using selected text.
Joanne Rossbridge
Joanne Rossbridge is an independent language and literacy consultant working in both primary and secondary schools and with teachers across Australia. She has worked as a classroom teacher and literacy consultant with the DET (NSW). Her expertise and much of her experience is in working with students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Joanne is particularly interested in student and teacher talk and how talk about language can assist the development of language and literacy.
Kathy Rushton
Kathy Rushton is interested in the development of language and literacy especially in disadvantaged communities. She has worked as a classroom teacher and literacy consultant and provides professional learning for teachers in the areas of language and literacy development. Her current research projects include a study of multilingual pre-service teachers and the impact that teacher professional learning has on the development of a creative pedagogical stance which supports translanguaging and student identity and wellbeing.
Day 1
Completing Tell Me Your Story: Supporting EAL/D Students from K-8 (Speaking and Listening) will contribute 5 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Accredited PD in the priority area of Delivery and Assessment of NSW Curriculum/EYLF addressing standard descriptors 1.3.2, 2.5.2 & 3.3.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.
Day 2
Completing Tell Me Your Story: Supporting EAL/D Students from K-8 (Reading) will contribute 5 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Accredited PD in the priority area of Delivery and Assessment of NSW Curriculum/EYLF addressing standard descriptors 1.3.2, 2.5.2, 3.3.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.
Day 3
Completing Tell Me Your Story: Supporting EAL/D Students from K-8 (Writing) will contribute 5 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Accredited PD in the priority area of Delivery and Assessment of NSW Curriculum/EYLF addressing standard descriptors 1.3.2, 2.5.2, 3.3.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.
Primary and Secondary teachers who support EAL/D students in both small groups and mainstream classrooms.
$660 for 3 days
Three whole day workshops with participants actively engaged in each session and undertaking reading and assignments between sessions.
The NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre is a registered COVID safe business, and all courses are run in compliance with the Federation’s COVID safety plan.
“Perfect balance of theory vs practical strategies. The theories and strategies will be impossible to forget – putting it into practice between session was great.”
“Loved the depth of knowledge on all aspects of literacy in the context of EAL/D learners.”
“So glad I attended – have learnt so much and feel inspired to share what I have learnt.”
“Presenters are absolutely fabulous! The perfect amount of banter and professionalism. They are experts in their field, and it shows. They invite the learner in – whatever level of knowledge they are coming with.”
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