Prevention is better than the cure: an ecological approach to EAL provision

“Prevention is better than the cure” – my brother.

My brother is a consultant cardiologist, working for the NHS. He’ll often talk about the NHS’s various drives towards prevention as opposed to cures, and in his case, promoting healthy lifestyles that help people avoid heart disease so they don’t have to go and see… well… people like him!

What’s all this got to do with EAL? Well. I’ve been reading this article by Virginia Rojas, which argues that a whole-school ecological view of language support for EAL students is superior to the ‘medical model’, where language specialists are sent to ‘fix’ students whose English is less advanced than needed.

In a nutshell and putting my own little spin on it: a medical model views the EAL specialist as a kind of ‘language doctor’, who sees his or her patients a few times a week to ‘cure’ them of their language deficiencies; once cured, said patients no longer need to go and visit the doctor.

An ‘ecological’ view of EAL provision sees the role of the EAL specialist as leading wider cultural shifts in multilingual schools, including supporting mainstream teachers to adapt provision in ways that enable all learners to access learning, educating parents and developing policy. It might still include some local intervention, but the remit is also to influence the wider ecology of the school in ways that open up the curriculum to learners using EAL.

…or, in other words, to focus on prevention instead of relying on a cure.

This isn’t to say one approach to EAL support is inherently ‘better’ than the other. I tend to shy away from normative statements: every context is different, every school is different, and what works in one place might not work in another for a range of reasons. Indeed as I’ve reflected this week I’ve come to think that an EAL specialist might be well employed doing both of these things: directly intervening to support learners with lower English proficiency, whilst also being active in enhancing the all round languages-and-learning ecology of a school.

This, more than anything, has stuck in my mind from the webinar, and makes me wonder what more the ‘language doctors’ of the world could be empowered to do to support prevention as well as, or even, instead of only focusing on ‘cures’?

(And with apologies to my brother for ruthlessly taking his well intended views so flagrantly out of context!)