Back to Plan your Day 2023 – Professor Cécile De Cat – Better Supporting EAL Pupils by Understanding Their Diversity Teaching and Learning Leeds Conference 2023 Timetable 2023 Workshop facilitator Professor Cécile De Cat Name of Workshop Better Supporting EAL Pupils by Understanding Their Diversity Who is it for Teachers and SENCOs working with EAL pupils; EAL coordinators; school leaders. Brief synopsis of workshop: The first part of the workshop will explain and illustrate the remarkable diversity of EAL pupils, based on research evidence from various Yorkshire-based studies as well as international research on multilingualism. Understanding that diversity is essential for all professionals working with EAL pupils. In particular, we will look at language dominance and how it changes over time, proficiency and practices in each language, factors that determine proficiency in each language, and the challenges of identifying multilingual children needing specialist support. The second part of the workshop will introduce a free online tool schools can use to collect information from parents regarding their child’s language experiences, and which automatically produces individual PDF reports for the school, detailing the child’s multilingual profile, along with research-informed guidance to interpret it. Both the first and the second parts will be interactive. The workshop is relevant to all education levels, from EYFS to secondary. What you will get out of it: Delegates will gain a deeper understanding of the diversity of EAL pupils and be given the means of obtaining the relevant information about their pupils. For front-line practitioners, this will enhance their ability to assess individual children’s needs in terms of language support. For coordinators and managers, this will provide information and opportunity to enhance their school’s policy and practice regarding the support of EAL pupils. Profile of facilitator: Cécile De Cat is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Leeds, and she is the Language Lead at the Centre for Applied Education Research in Bradford. Most of her research focuses on language development in monolingual and multilingual children and in multilingual adults. Questions she is interested in include: What aspects of language are more difficult to acquire (or easier to lose)? What predicts better/faster language outcomes in children? Does the Heritage Language (or Home Language) of bilingual children scaffold their acquisition of English? She is currently leading on projects to create online tools to document bilingual children’s language experience (q-bex.org), to assess core language skills at KS3 and KS4 (caer.org) and to understand individual variation in Heritage Language acquisition and maintenance (uit.no/research/acqva). Twitter @ceciletje Website
