Seymour College: Wednesday 13th September 2023, 1:00-4:00pm (3 hours PD) 

Presented by:

Mingxia Wei- Head of Languages & Director of International Programs at Seymour College

Trish Tynan- EAL/D Specialist at St Peter’s Girl’s School & IPSHA EAL/D Coordinator.

It was a lovely afternoon visiting Seymour College and having the time to listen to how the EAL/D programme is delivered in their setting. It was particularly interesting to hear about their enrolment processes and how they specifically cater for new arrival students. Many parents prefer to have their children join the mainstream classroom and receive additional after school tutoring and EALD classes after school. There were many teaching and admin staff available on site to assist with translations and adapting to Australian school and community settings, which are quite different in comparison to Chinese settings. It is always a great insight and pleasure to learn how programmes are run in varying settings across Adelaide.

LEAP Level Moderation Activity:

How often should we be doing LEAP levels? Twice per semester using two samples of writing genres. This means four times per year, which can be a challenge, the levelling process takes a considerable amount of time and many of us (EALD Teachers) are doing this alone, we do not have a team and classroom teachers have not been trained on how to do them.

So, how do EALD staff manage to do this LEAP levelling in their own times/ non- teaching times? Some teachers request release days to LEAP level, others use their NIT or take lessons to do assessments with students each week.

In this session we were given three writing samples from Year 2 students and were asked to level the samples. This was a good opportunity for us to analyse samples of writing and look at the writing leap level rubrics to identify specific indicators to accurately level these students.

Using the Writing rubrics gives you a snap shot to quickly identify the LEAP level, however, it is important to use LEAP Evidence grid to identify the specific areas where students need support, their writing focus areas to further develop their English writing skills.

See attachments of the LEAP text type rubrics below and the LEAP evidence  to inform teaching and learning grid.

1 learning-english-achievement-proficiency-leap-informative-texts

1 learning-english-achievement-proficiency-leap-recounting-narrating-texts

1 Persuasive and Evaluative texts

01 LEAP-Assessment-Monitoring-Recording (dragged)

Today, there were many rich professional discussions around how we cater for the needs of our EALD students in our own school settings. As always it was a pleasure to attend the IPSHA EALD Collegial Group Meeting.

Thanks Trish Tynan and Mingxia Wei for hosting us this afternoon.