We would love you to join us for a focus group on EAL learners’ experience of listening and reading comprehension in narrative and expository texts.

All participants will receive a £15 Amazon voucher for taking part.

WHEN:

3.15-4pm online via Zoom or Teams – instructions to follow

Option 1: 25 Jan 2023

Option 2: 26 Jan 2023

Option 3: 2 Feb 2023

Option 4: 8 Feb 2023

Option 5: 9 Feb 2023

Please follow this link to sign up and choose the session that is most convenient for you: https://forms.office.com/e/89KzjY7aaj

WHY:

As researchers we are interested in finding out more about what predicts differences in children’s understanding when they listen or read a text. 

Individual differences between children determine their ability to comprehend texts; at the same time different texts pose different challenges to readers. For instance, expository texts (i.e. texts designed to convey new information) and narrative texts (i.e. texts designed to report a story) differ in structure, and need readers to have different skills and strategies

From our perspective as researchers, it is important to understand whether children who are monolingual, bilingual or even trilingual rely on the same or on different linguistic and cognitive skills to read to learn, and whether these skills are similar to those necessary to understand spoken texts. Understanding whether individual differences in language experience affect the reading and listening will improve our understanding of the effect of bilingualism on comprehension and how we teach.

We are interested in understanding what classroom teachers feel about these differences in understanding and how you support multilingual students in the classroom.

So, if you are a teacher teaching multilingual children, we would love to hear from you!

Prof Ludovica Serratrice (University of Reading – https://tinyurl.com/227h4jdj) and Dr Alessandra Valentini (University of Greenwich – https://tinyurl.com/txsymwk6 )

Hope to see you there!