Specialist education consultant, Sejal Payne, shares practical strategies to support learning at home for children and families with EAL

7 min read

In this article, Sejal Payne offers guidance and practical suggestions about supporting learning at home for children and their families with EAL. You’ll find lots of links to useful resources throughout.

For Parents and carers of children with English as an Additional Language (EAL), ensuring that their children do well in education, and are successful in life is one of their most important priorities. Though the aspirations may be high, some will not have the  ‘know how’ or the correct tools to actively support their children’s learning. Parents may feel that they have little to contribute to their children’s learning due to their differing school experiences or lack of fluent English. They may rely on settings and schools to be the main educators and not understand that they are first and foremost educators. They may feel especially vulnerable with supporting home learning.

A key recommendation from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance report : WORKING WITH PARENTS TO SUPPORT CHILDREN’S LEARNING (2018) asks that settings and schools ‘provide practical strategies to support learning at home.’

Some practical ways to support home learning are :

• Detailed information gathering and sharing – provide parents and carers with comprehensive information on the setting/ school to keep them well informed from the outset. General information packs with prospectus may need translating or be visual, especially for new to English parents. Packs should include information about:

• • • the British school system
    • the role of home languages
    • how the setting/ school will support the children and parents
    • key messages on parents’ role in successful educational outcomes for their children
    • information about classes, groupings, and home learning expectations

Gather detailed information on the children and families, enabling practitioners in settings and schools to identify families needing additional support, such as face to face meetings to explain how the school functions and share ‘welcome books’ such as this one from Wokingham county council. Bell Foundation have some useful guides explaining the school system in different languages.

• Parents in partnership – parents and carers may be unaware of ways to directly engage with the setting/ school, and their children’s learning. Foster ongoing parental involvement by having a two-way communication, listening to, and consulting parents. Ensure that key dates in the setting/ school calendar, such as INSETS and home learning schedules are understood. Goodall and Montgomery (2014) note that time pressures in schools, can often reduce meaningful discussions to “little conversations beyond instructions: parents may have the opportunity to say little other than hello”. For parents with EAL, this can give an impression of a closed-door policy and an invalid voice. Low parental attendance to key events such as parent’s evening and curricular workshops may be due to logistics. School leaders need to monitor and evaluate attendance and offer timetable flexibility, extra time for the meetings and translation services as needed.

• Develop parents’ expertise – to support home learning. Parent workshops/coffee mornings/stay and play sessions aimed specifically for parents with EAL present an ideal opportunity to gain knowledge about the setting/ school’s teaching and learning approaches and the curriculum. It reinforces these aspects in a practical and fun way and helps parents make clear links between setting/ school and home learning. Putting them in their children’s shoes by trying out some curricular activities is empowering and enlightening. Parent pocket guides are also a useful tool for explaining the curricular areas in ‘parent speak’, providing bite size information and can be easily translated in home languages.

• Facilitate ESOL classes – to support parents’ English language skills. ESOL classes are the bridge to supporting their child’s learning, providing lifelong learning prospects for parents and modelling to their children that learning goes beyond school. Some settings/ schools work collaboratively with community learning, charity organisations and supplementary schools (faith based and community languages) to facilitate ESOL to their parents and carers. Language cafés, where parents meet informally to practice conversations in English, build confidence and provide a network of support. The Parents’ Integration through Partnership project in London demonstrated how a holistic and participatory approach to delivering ESOL can be powerful for supporting overall learning outcomes for children with EAL.

• Family learning – ‘Family who learns together, grows together’ – parents may not appreciate that family learning is about learning new skills together, having joint interests and enjoyment in learning. They may focus on formal home learning however still require help to organise, structure and enable that learning – e.g., for older children, a desk for homework, quiet space, set time for home learning. Offer bespoke practical sessions on home learning for parents and carers to reinforce the importance of home learning, especially through play and everyday activities and guide how to provide the right environment and supporting aids for effective home learning at minimal cost. Parents can discover how to actively support their children’s learning through play, make learning fun, utilise everyday activities for learning and language development. Settings/ schools can support parents with suitable supporting learning aids for the children such as bilingual dictionaries, thesaurus, and dual language story books. Home learning needs to be differentiated according to the children’s English language acquisition needs. For example, generic spellings can be replaced with sending home a new text to pre visit and explore with parents so the child can access it within the classroom learning. For new to English children, compiling a working bilingual dictionary (linked to an area of learning) with the parents becomes an aide memoir for the child at school and develops language and cognition in both languages. Bell Foundation offer a Helping your child learn guide for parents.

• Offer extracurricular support – any extracurricular clubs or activities offer vital opportunities for children with EAL to practice and consolidate the classroom learning. Homework clubs are particularly effective in supporting the children with their home learning. Many community groups run after school or weekend homework clubs. Schools need to engage with the supplementary schools to ensure that home learning opportunities are being enhanced. Schools also need to monitor the extracurricular clubs that are being offered to ensure that any barriers to attendance of children with EAL are removed.

• Reading with the children at home – parents and carers with EAL may consider decoding to be the product of reading and miss the importance of reading for fun, and for comprehension. They may need support to share a book with their children, to talk about it and to do some activities around it. Give parents some fun home learning reading activities such as DARTS to consolidate reading comprehension skills and language development. Or send a picture from a book (without words) and invite the parents to talk about the picture with their child and generate words, put some sentences together, develop possible story lines and practice asking questions. This can be done in any language, as long as the exploratory talk is happening.

• The role of home language – parents may be unaware of the crucial role of the home language in learning and not know if they can use home language for learning or how to do so. Many settings/ schools give out additional information on the role of the home language as a tool for learning to promote the benefits of bilingualism. Here is a guide from the British Council, and this one is from Hereford Council on supporting home languages. Children who speak their home language well can explore ideas and think in both languages, increasing their confidence in learning. Parents should be encouraged to use their home languages, especially in home learning, as concepts and principles learnt in a home language can be applied to acquire English. Home language in essence becomes the hanging peg and the bridge between what the children know and what they need to know.

• Home learning resources lending libraries – settings/ schools can set up a multilingual lending library to support families practically with home learning. Resources can include dual language books, story sacks, rhymes, songs, games for language development and maths. Involving bilingual parents in creating the lending resources builds their expertise and gives them an ownership to using them.

• Signposting – to additional accessible resources and support is essential for families with EAL – ESOL, libraries, children’s centres, community groups, supplementary school, and the best websites for learning. It is important to ensure that families are made aware of the digital dangers and understand the safeguarding aspects of internet access.

Cummins ( 1996) cited the “extent to which minority communities feel empowered to participate in their children’s education as a key factor schools must address if young bilingual learners are to reach their full potential”. So, schools must ensure that parents with EAL feel empowered and confident in supporting their children’s learning.