EAL Department · Week 2 of 6
Week 2: Identify language demands
Look beyond vocabulary to the instructions, relationships, sentence patterns and text structures that carry subject thinking.
Your guiding question
What language does this task require learners to understand and produce?
Look beyond vocabulary to the instructions, relationships, sentence patterns and text structures that carry subject thinking.
Weekly outcome: One annotated task with a subject goal and a focused language goal.
Understand the idea
Start with the subject thinking.
Decide what success means in the curriculum: explaining a cause, comparing sources, justifying a method or describing a pattern. Keep that thinking visible while examining the language needed to show it.
Analyse language at several levels.
Identify essential words, including everyday words with specialist meanings. Then look at sentence relationships such as cause, contrast and qualification. Finally, examine how ideas are organised across a whole response, diagram, source or text.
Check what learners must do with the language.
An instruction such as “evaluate” can hide several moves: identify a claim, select evidence, weigh limitations and reach a judgement. Show those moves in a short model. Choose one teachable language priority rather than attempting to teach every unfamiliar feature.
Try it in a real lesson
- Bring an upcoming task and a short example of a successful response.
- Underline the subject thinking in the task. Circle key command words and specialist or ambiguous vocabulary.
- Annotate a useful sentence relationship and the overall response structure. Include the language in any diagram or graph.
- Write one content goal and one language goal. Decide how a learner could demonstrate each.
Fictional worked example
See the decisions in practice
Science task
“Explain why the forces on the object are balanced.” The content goal is to reason about equal forces acting in opposite directions. The language goal is to connect diagram evidence to that conclusion using a reason clause.
Model and annotation
“The forces are balanced because they are equal in size and act in opposite directions.” Highlight “because” as the link between the claim and its reason. Explain “balanced” in this scientific context rather than assuming its everyday meaning is enough.
Other subjects
Maths: “Compare 3/4 and 2/3 and justify your answer” needs a comparison and evidence. History: “How useful is this source?” needs an evidence-based judgement, including a limitation. A primary task comparing two materials can use “Both …, but …”.
Make your weekly record
Annotate one task under four headings: subject thinking; essential words; sentence relationships; response structure. Add one content goal, one language goal and the evidence that would show success.
Reflect on what happened
- Which demand was hidden in the instructions?
- Does my model show the thinking as well as the vocabulary?
- Is the language goal small enough to teach and observe?
Discuss with a colleague
Compare the task analysis with a colleague. Agree the one language feature that would most improve access to the intended subject thinking.
For the EAL colleague: Offer the subject teacher a short annotated model rather than a long vocabulary list alone. Agree which terms must retain their disciplinary meaning.
For the subject teacher: Explain the successful reasoning to your EAL colleague, then identify the wording and structure learners need to communicate it.
Pause and think
A worksheet replaces technical words with easier synonyms but leaves a long, indirect instruction unchanged. Has the main language barrier necessarily been removed?
Compare your thinking
No. The difficulty may lie in the instruction, the relationships between ideas or the expected response. Analyse the task and model response before deciding what to change; retain essential technical terms and teach them explicitly.
Use these resources
Further reading: The Bell Foundation: planning for language and integrated teaching ↗. This week’s sequence and examples are original EAL in Practice materials.
Your week 2 record
Plan, trial and reflect
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