Bi-lingual nature of The Sultan’s School and how this impacts Teaching, Learning and Assessment

 To focus on the bi-lingual nature of our school population  Create a written section in the Teaching, Learning and Assessment document that outlines the profile of the bilingual nature of the students we teach  Look at how we can best serve the needs of bi-lingual students and how this needs to be part of the policy

One Language? One Language and a small amount of second language? Two Languages (L1) + other foreign languages Bi-lingual?

Year 7 scholars in term 1, some students in Year 10 with no Arabic Year 8 scholars some or our students with weak Arabic Students in IB? Some of our older students

Uneven Language abilities with either Arabic or English being dominant Need a register! Stabilisers needed on the smaller wheel. 1.ESL specialists in some English classes 2.Small group more 1:1 (Gill’s role) 3.All staff teaching Language in their subjects and offering ‘stabilisers’ for the bike 4.A stabiliser specialist to coordinate 5.Arabic Stabilisers? 2 nd Language/ Arabic B

 New to English  Becoming Familiar with English  Becoming Confident as a user of English  A Competent user in most social and learning contexts  Fluent

 Entrance assessment needs to be much improved to give a category  Allocation of a category for all students in a class  Knowledge of language spoken at home

Greater awareness of how language operates (helps to learn a 3 rd language) Enhanced problem solving skills (maths and ICT) Heightened creative potential (writing and critical understanding) Awareness of context and audience in language ref: htttp:// pdf

‘ Children who are exposed to two languages simultaneously do not typically acquire each language at the same rate as children only exposed to one language ‘ ‘..dual language input affected both the children’s grammatical development as well as vocabulary.This same study indicates that if vocabulary knowledge among monolingual children is compared with bilinguals’ vocabulary in both languages, the result is that both groups are comparable. The difference is that monolinguals possess whole vocabulary in one language as opposed to bilinguals who have a vocabulary divided between two languages.’ The Importance of Being Bilingual: The effects of bilingualism on cognitive development and the role of language valorisation.B. A. EssayElin Arnarsdóttir April m.pdf Even still, studies suggesting a positive relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development far outnumber the ones indicating the opposite, where social networks and language valorisation play paramount roles in determining level of bilingual proficiency.