National Curriculums, and why they concern us SR-EALers.

I am not anti the English Nation Curriculum ( https://www.gov.uk/national-curriculum) by any means; let's get that perfectly clear right from the start. But, yes, I suspect you'd struggle to find an SR-EALer who didn't harbor certain curriculum 'misgivings.' Now, I don't mean misgivings about curriculums in principle -that is, the curriculum as a 'blue-print,' or guide for schemes of work. My concern lies squarely with mismatches between what the curriculum prescribes and actual EAL children's needs, along with the sub-optimal teaching that arises when schools insist we follow a curriculum to the letter. From what I see, all too many school leaders still believe that meticulously working through a curriculum is the goal to which all responsible teachers should aspire. Implementing the curriculum, in this view, becomes not a means of achieving an end -that proper end for us EAL teachers being that students attain certain critical skills or understandings- but the end in itself. It's as if subject coordinators and others of this mindset have adopted a mantra that they can't stop repeating: 'Cover the curriculum at all costs! It's your job!' And what do we teachers do? Well, for the most part we respond by doing as we're told. We tick off items on lists and judge our performance by how many curriculum items we have covered by the end of the year. If we've ticked off all items in the relevant curriculum section we reward ourselves a hearty clap on the back and call it a job well done. If we fail, well.... we sit down and figure out how to squeeze everything into our lessons next time round. And so it goes on, term after term, year after year. But all this does rather lead to a few basic and important questions. What if the English National Curriculum curriculum doesn't quite mesh with our EAL student needs? And, if it doesn't, shouldn't we have the courage and authority to adapt it?

Before launching into a list of concerns, let me clarify with a repetition. As noted, despite my reservations, no SR-EALer would dismiss NC's as unhelpful, irrelevant or fully unfit for purpose. We simply call for more free rein in 'what' we teach', and 'how' than NC's with their prescriptive lists allow for. NCs have not got it all wrong; they just haven't got it all 'right' and we need to acknowledge this. No one denies the NC has much to offer. A devout SR-EALer may hold national curriculums in high regard -I do, for one. On the other hand no one can seriously tell me that sections dealing with English ideally meet my students' needs. And if they don't meet those needs, then doesn't it follow that trying to implement the curriculum ever more efficiently and diligently can only take us 'so far.'

So, what exactly about NCs gets us SR-EALers so riled up? In a word, their 'generality' -that distressing quality of 'one-size-fits-allness.' If we're intent on improving EAL delivery then we must face up to a basic truth: However much effort and research goes into its preparation, a National Curriculum it will never meet the EAL needs of particular students in particular schools. I applaud the curriculum designers' tasked with compiling a document to meet the needs of a diverse national population. But even with the best will in the world, those designers have no choice but to piece together a messy compromise that cannot but leave many teachers and students disappointed. An NC curriculum document might serve us EAL teachers, after a fashion. What it will never do is give us that ideal 'match up' with the particular students' (EAL) needs that we're striving for. It may come close, if we're lucky, but it cannot but fall short. All broad-brush, compromise, approaches necessarily do.

This holds for EAL teachers in the UK, but so much more so for those whose careers have taken us to international schools overseas. My professional experience (plus common sense, quite frankly) tells me that slavishly following the English section of a curriculum designed for children in Chelmsford or Ongar will never prove the most time-effective route to exiting my Hanoi based students from the EAL register. How could it? The needs of Thai or Vietnamese English language learners have little in common with the needs of an English first language speaker attending lessons in the UK. This doesn't mean that a national curriculum cannot serve as a guide, and even a good one at that. We can sensibly browse through an NC for inspiration and likely come away with useful pointers for future lessons. At the same time, let's not fool ourselves into believing that 'ticking off' national curriculum objectives in the English Section during weekly planning meetings should stand as the proper 'end goal' of responsible EAL staff. The proper 'end goal' must remain, as SR-EALers insist, to ensure that students speak, read and write 'satisfactory' English at such time as they leave our care. A curriculum designed with children of 'Nation X' in mind may help us towards this 'end' but only after judicious pruning and with our students' academic and social needs foremost in mind. Through informed pruning, that is, can we work around the 'generality' issue and deliver bespoke, personalized, lessons tailored to language needs.

But what pruning, exactly? What form might it take? I'll limit my observations to the NC of England, but what I say no doubt holds for NCs more generally. First off, you might sensibly (surely) cross out all those provisions in the 'English section' that implicitly assume students of native-like English competence. Why, for example, would EAL teachers choose to spend days teaching Haiku poems to a child who cannot as yet name common classroom objects? Why would we teach expanded noun phrases to children whose vocabulary as yet numbers just a few hundred words and who struggle to ask permission to go to the toilet!? Why kick off the year teaching metaphors or onomatopoeias to students who still cannot respond to simple greetings? Poetry, metaphors and such like can surely come later, at a more appropriate time on the student's path towards English mastery. The most pressing need of those with no English is (again, surely) a relevant vocabulary and a repertoire of survival phrases they can put to immediate use. And yet, over and over again, and despite this obvious error I've seen teachers striving to adapt a lesson on similes, say, so that it becomes accessible to a child with essentially no English to speak of. Why do they do it? Well, because they feel obliged to cover the curriculum at the expense of ignoring their own well-honed instincts as to the child's real language needs. Pursuing NC goals for 'Year X' is fine, but it properly lies further down the road. And if this rather strikes you as just plain obvious, well, it should. And yet many EAL teachers have no option but to help children work towards national curriculum objectives despite those objectives failing to address even the most pressing language needs. I call it the 'tyranny of the curriculum.'

A second type of pruning concerns not so much language content as 'time allocation.' Some NC topics (I'm talking about the English language section, here) may require far more attention than the curriculum intimates as strictly necessary with our EAL students needs in mind. If you have ever taught in China, Thailand or Vietnam you'll have learnt early on how children struggle with the tenses, subject/verb agreement, plurality and the articles. The national curriculum touches on such grammatical details but, and understandably given specifically English children's needs in mind, does not dwell on these language facets to the extent that EAL children in overseas bilingual and international schools truly require. For my current students, Here in Hanoi these topics remain a key focus of my lessons and will likely do so for some time to come. Commercial materials designed with a view to meeting NC requirements (Hamilton literacy plans, to take but one example), likewise tend to skip over these same grammatical issues.

The third type of pruning (well, pruning and replacing) involves adding to our teaching those several aspects of English that the national curriculum either doesn't mention at all, or does so only in passing. The most obvious topic that springs to mind is vocabulary, noted earlier. The NC certainly doesn't shy away from reminding us that children reap many benefits from a deep and broad vocabulary, yet scarcely does it venture beyond remarking that children should know high frequency words. I find this understandable - defensible even- in the context of students in England for whom the NC was designed. Such students enjoy the good fortune of English immersion 24/7. 'Picking up' new word meanings becomes a natural outcome off living and breathing in an English L1 environment. But what about our EAL students? What about children learning English in NC based international schools in Jakarta, Shanghai (etc.) who have no such intense exposure. Just what vocabulary to teach my students, and how, has become something of a pet research project. I imagine other SR-EALers likewise find themselves struggling to address serious vocabulary deficits. I still cannot fathom why international schools do not take the issue of vocabulary development way more seriously.

And it's not just vocabulary deficits. Let's not forget all those grammatical stumbling blocks to which teachers in England hardly need give a second thought. Even before they begin formal schooling, native English speaking children habitually make well-formed questions or negatives with the verb 'to do,' will supply a form of the verb 'to be' when called for, and can construct passive voice clauses. Not so a primary aged child in Vietnam or China. Nothing in the NC (of England), and the veritable raft of commercial materials based on that curriculum, directs us (or alerts us) to explaining just why "Where you go?" is incorrect, and that "I not play football" should really be "I don't play football." To solve these challenges, and more, we need to break away form the NC shackles and branch out on our own.

Another mismatch of needs with curriculum stipulations lies in Phonics instruction. We all agree that synthetic phonics stands head and shoulders above alternative methods when it comes to teaching reading and spelling. The UK government quite rightly took this on board many years ago and now provides a list of 'Validated' phonics programs for teachers to select from. But how effectively do these programs meet our EAL students needs? Here's the problem: The difficulties a child experiences when learning the sounds of an additional language depend upon his or her first language background. Thai students learning English will experience difficulty auditorily distinguishing between sh and ch for example; they will make errors with intonation: haPPY as opposed to happy, they will add syllables where they should not 'Ser-school' for 'school' and they will replace the 'l' sound in liver with the 'r' in river. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, none of the courses that UK government point us to for phonics teaching address these particular issues; it's the same generality issue I mentioned above. Were I to teach Jolly Phonics or Monster Phonics to my Thai EAL children I'm sure they would learn a great deal. My argument is simply this: Wouldn't they learn a whole lot more, and wouldn't I be making better use of classroom time if I could adapt these courses to make them more sensitive to my students' needs?

So, what can we conclude? Well, first off, let's agree that 'EAL children do indeed learn English in schools that religiously follow a NC to the letter' - at least some English. It's not that dutifully an NC is all bad. It's just that we as EAL teachers can surely do so much better if schools would allow us to amend and modify the curriculum as we see fit -to tailor the curriculum to our particular students' needs. The more we set time aside time to look at children's specific language needs the more effective our teaching ultimately becomes. That uphill quest for professional freedom -that yearning to branch away from 'broad brush' curriculum prescriptions- really lies at the very heart of what SR-EAL is all about. You might disagree with this post. I 'get it.' But you can't deny one basic, fundamental, point: Curriculums designed for mass market -the one size fits all option -will never meet the needs of a particular student population within that market. Don't we then owe it to our students to amend our curriculums to ensure that they do?