This blog post is based on a doctoral research study that explored perceptions and experiences of multiculturalism of teachers, students and parents in four mainstream primary schools in the predominantly ‘White’ south-west England.
One of the main findings of my study was a linguistic barrier characterised by issues concerning communication in English. Teachers stressed strengthening EAL (English as an Additional Language) for students because it is essential to understand the task, make friends and acclimatise to the school environment. Furthermore, teachers expressed a need for some support network for ethnic minority parents for whom communicating in English was a concern. This particular research finding made me ponder on EAL as a multilingual researcher belonging to an ethnic minority community.
I acknowledge the importance of EAL in school teaching as it is significantly connected to fulfilling curriculum-specific targets having implications for sitting assessments like SATs. However, it is possibly important to review the term EAL per se. EAL has a deficit-based connotation. It illuminates a perceived gap among the ethnic minority students, resonating with the post-Second World War assimilationist policies of the British education system that emphasised teaching English to tackle the ‘disadvantage’ among ethnic minority students. Backed by my research findings and literature, today this term implies that although ethnic minority students might be academically performing better than their White peers by overcoming hurdles due to their disadvantaged backgrounds (Strand, 2011), they are still ‘not quite there’.
