View the vignettes below

	Primary vignette The Literacy Hour in a Yr 1 Classroom
	Primary ICT Vignette     Year 2 Literacy Lesson using Clicker
	Secondary ICT Vignette     Using British Council magazine articles in KS3
	Secondary vignette Science (Plants and Animal Cells) KS3
	Secondary ICT Vignette     Using a simulation in KS3 Science
	Secondary vignette Geography (Cities Module) KS3
	Secondary vignette History (The First World War ) KS3
	Secondary vignette Science (Acids and Alkalis) KS3
	Secondary vignette Religious Education (Abortion and Euthanasia) KS4
	Secondary ICT Vignette     Using Word in KS3 Maths
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Vignettes of Classroom Practice

NALDIC has argued that the teaching and learning of EAL should be recognised by all educators as a field of education with distinctive features. This position was set out in Working Paper 5, The Distinctiveness of English as an Additional Language: a cross-curriculum discipline, published by NALDIC in 1999. It defined the distinctive features in terms of how EAL can be conceptualised, the knowledge base which informs EAL, the learners, the task faced by learners, and EAL pedagogy including five principles which underpin good practice. Just as there has been a need to assert the distinctiveness of EAL and to articulate how it may be understood, so also there has been a need to show what it looks like in practice. We hope that these vignettes will make a useful contribution to the growing field of UK-based professional and research literature concerned with the education of linguistically and ethnically diverse children.

Every teaching situation has its own particular features and these vignettes are not intended to reflect all aspects of teaching and learning EAL, or to offer a full description of a particular lesson, or to provide ready-made solutions to difficulties. They are intended to offer an insight into the process of teaching and learning EAL through the description given, to provide sufficient background information for the picture presented to be understood, and to relate the teaching described to key principles for EAL pedagogy. Their primary purpose is to show disciplinary identity, classroom complexity and pedagogic possibility in a range of curriculum areas.

The practice shown in the vignettes complements the perspective on EAL set out in Working Paper 5. They show strategies that complement and amplify, in relation to the specific classroom circumstances described, the five principles which underpin good practice summarised in Working Paper 5. It is important that the significance of practice in relation to EAL as a field of education is understood through principles which can be applied in other circumstances. The five principles used in Working Paper 5 are:

• Activating prior knowledge
• The provision of a rich contextual background to make input comprehensible
• Actively encouraging comprehensible output
• Drawing the learner's attention to the relationship between form and function; making key grammatical elements explicit
• Developing learner independence

These are all principles of fundamental importance, but they are clearly not the only ones that can be drawn from the practice of teaching EAL. The descriptions in different vignettes will generate other principles. However they should all contribute to our understanding of the process of teaching and learning EAL and to what we have called 'disciplinary identity'.