Ormiston Meridian Academy EAL team offers support to pupils, who are new to the English language, have basic or limited English or needs some differentiated literacy support due to their EAL needs.

When a bilingual/multilingual pupil first joins OMA, the EAL coordinator meets them to assess their current language needs and to set EAL support individually for each EAL student according to their level of English and their needs.

These EAL interventions support EAL learners during their language acquisition process while preparing them to respond successfully and with confidence, in order to remove the barriers so that students can access the language demand in main stream lessons and daily life.

Reading is a key to knowledge and gives each student the ability to communicate with the world. Our EAL team provides reading intervention to each EAL student. We use reading age testing as a starting point, identifying the language knowledge of each student.. When a child is not matching is identified as performing below their reading age and their chronological age, we apply reading interventions. In these sessions, children read 1-1 or in small group to identity new words (collecting those in EAL keyword book to apply when writing), discuss their meaning, pronunciation and use in specific subject connected content. We do communicate with teachers to identify the vocabulary required to embed the knowledge and skills for all subjects, to support the curriculum across the school and to prepare the EAL students for their lessons.

All of the new language is then applied into written tasks, which parents can supervise and check to monitor their child’s progress in written form.

We test 3-4 times a year to monitor reading progress of all our EAL students.  Using their outcomes,  we measure their indiviual progress, and adjust our strategies and reading interventions accordingly. Parents are informed via a phone call or a home visit, in which we explain the process and the importance of reading at home.