EAL

EAL Workshop for Lewisham Primary School Teachers

On Wednesday, the 12th of June we ran an EAL workshop for Lewisham Primary School teachers. Participants expressed their appreciation on the feedback forms.

What additional strategies will I implement in school and classes as a result of this session?

ESOL Classes for parents- Multi-lingual display- Refugee Week- International Mother Language Day- Substitute tables- Dual language use; 5 keywords per lesson in a visual dictionary- Online differentiation websites such Diffit and DeepL-Language surveys

What went well during the session?

Learning more about how other schools support their EAL learners- Learning about more resources- Lots of discussion and shared ideas- handouts- slides- lots of ideas about scaffolding

See more on our tweet- https://x.com/PLSEALDep/status/1801000686101954896

EAL workshop twitter still

COMMUNITY LANGUAGES GCSE EXAMS

Did you know you could take your Community Languages GCSE exams in 19 languages from year 10 onwards in the UK? In PLS we value diversity and inclusion therefore, we are keen to highlight the importance of language learning in multi-national London. We offer students the opportunity to take a language exam they speak at home.

This year we entered 29 students for GCSE exams in their home languages.

These languages are as follows.

Arabic	French	Italian	Persian	Turkish
Bengali	German	Japanese	Panjabi	Urdu
Biblical/Modern Hebrew	Greek	Polish	Russian
Chinese	Gujarati	Portuguese	Spanish

We also offer after-school intervention classes in Turkish, Spanish, French, Italian and Polish.

Contact Mrs Bauhofer, the PLS EAL Coordinator, if your child is literate in any of these languages.

Turkish intervention work

To mark International Women's Day, we visited the wonderful Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece in the House of Lords. We have also met the amazing Baroness Floella Benjamin OBE. Both incredible ladies had a very constructive chat with our students about the importance of women's participation in politics.

Tweet by Dame Floella Benjamin

To mark International Mother Language Day, Ms Anne-Marie Dias Borges, BBC Africa's senior presenter and journalist, visited our Primary and Secondary Schools to deliver a speech about the importance of maintaining home languages while acquiring new languages. She speaks 4 languages fluently and is currently learning Japanese and Chinese. You can see our tweets about this event here.

Anne Marie Dias Borges 2 Anne Marie Dias Borges 3

Anne Marie Dias Borges tweet

You can see a few photos and read our tweet chain about the PLS Refugee Week celebrations here

We thank to members of AFRIL and Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network for visiting our schools and running a workshop and an assembly in our school.

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You can watch the full message from Mark Ruffalo here:

Here is our Refugee Week Presentation

Another year 11 student read a story called The Fool and The Donkey in Persian. Listen below:

Our year 11 student read a story called 'The Bullies' written by Mateen Abdul in Pashto.

Our Year 11 student read a story called The Ant and The Elephant written by Emal Jabarkhalil in Pashto. We used the amazing resources on World Stories website. They are strongly recommended.

Listen to Carnations and Tomato Juice written by Turkish author, Sait Faik Abasıyanık, read by Turkish actor Levent Uzumcu, who permitted us to publish this clip on our YouTube page.

Discover the inspiring story of Semiha Berksoy, Turkey's first female opera singer, through the insightful book written by writer and journalist Özlem Özdemir, who also narrated it.