Improving outcomes in science for learners with English as an additional language (EAL)

last updated:July 2009

Whist this case study mainly focuses on Year 7 pupils we believe it has a number of key messages for teachers in the primary phase too. De Ferrers Specialist Technology College is an LEA Comprehensive School with 1800 pupils and over 100 members of staff situated on the outskirts of Burton on Trent. The project was undertaken in conjunction with the science faculty. It involved an EMA specialist and a science teacher. Two classes of Year 7 students were involved in the project. Students in Years 7-10 were interviewed. The teacher-researchers also used videoed and taped recordings of minority ethnic pupils to gain a picture of difficulties they felt they encountered and how they might be addressed. In total, over 100 students took part in the study. Ethnic minority pupils form approximately 10% of the college’s population. 

The two teachers involved in the collaboration had two main aims:

• to see how the science curriculum at KS3 could be made more accessible for EAL learners of Pakistani origin; and
• to develop an effective teaching partnership between specialist subject staff and ethnic minority achievement grant funded (EMA) support staff.

What problem did the study aim to address?
This research was prompted by an analysis of the school’s national test results, which showed that pupils of Pakistani origin were falling behind the main school population in terms of achieving Level 5 in mathematics and science. The gap between the majority school population and Pakistani girls was even greater than that for boys. The teachers wished to find out why these students could achieve Level 5 in English, but not in science.

How did teachers decide which strategies would be helpful?
In the first term of the project the teachers conducted interviews with pupils and used the findings to help them plan the project activities for the second term. They developed a variety of strategies, including:

• games and activities using key words from learning content
• worksheets to aid writing connected with experiments-such as planning and drawing conclusions from results
• writing frames to ‘scaffold’ students’ report writing
• worksheets using DARTs (Directed Activities Related to Text) activities, and
• a science dictionary for Year 7 pupils.

Games and activities using key words were based on approaches such as card games matching words and meaning, and putting key words in sentences. These were designed for pairs or small groups of pupils. Teachers also created word searching activities for example, a ’four in a row’ game (using true or false questions to complete the game).

Prepared worksheets aided pupils in writing up experiments; these involved cloze activities – which are based on word prediction, sequencing and use of tables. Writing frames helped to structure pupils’ report writing, offering them sentence stems, connectives, and specific vocabulary they could follow.

A science dictionary was also published containing key words for each topic with simple definitions.

What were the outcomes of the project?
Discussions with students, classroom observations and analysis of teaching and learning strategies gave an insight into how the science curriculum could be made more accessible for EAL learners.

Many pupils identified new vocabulary as an issue. They felt new words were ‘coming at us too quickly’ for them to learn their meanings. When asked why they didn’t ask the teacher, one pupil replied, ‘I didn’t want the teacher to think I didn’t understand because they might think I’m in the wrong set, but I don’t understand because I’m learning in another language’.

The pupil interviewees all agreed dictionaries containing specific scientific definitions of words would be helpful. One highlighted the inadequacies of standard dictionaries, ‘When I look in a dictionary for a word I see lots of explanations but I don’t know which is the science one’.

All interviewees felt that they enjoyed practical lessons the most and learnt the most during them. They identified writing in science as difficult because they are uncertain about which voice to use, passive or active. They also had trouble deciding what had to be included in their writing. One student commented that ‘I wrote down method, result and conclusion for lots of experiments and never understood and still don’t know what to write in each heading’.

Some pupils commented that they had to copy from the board whilst the teacher was explaining the work. They found this particularly frustrating, as they could not concentrate on the explanation as they were fully occupied with accuracy.

Few pupils felt that Urdu translations would be useful. However, they all felt the benefits of having other EAL students in their group as they could talk things through in their first language (Punjabi-a spoken language).

What did the project achieve?
The strategies used were evaluated through student comment, end of module tests and classroom observations. The researchers found:

• specific teaching on keywords helped pupils improve their oral contributions and they were more likely to use the correct vocabulary
• pupils found the dictionaries most useful: their written work improved in terms of structure and use of specific science vocabulary and the end of topic tests showed an improvement for the majority of the group; and
• pupils felt they were taking a more active part in their report writing, not merely copying from the board.

Reference
Julie O’Connor, National Teacher Research Panel summary: Improving outcomes for learners with English as an additional language (EAL) in science

National Teacher research panel publications website