About Us
ABOUT US
Sally Roberts
Sally Roberts is an EAL advisor and Advanced EAL Practitioner, with 10 years' experience of leading schools and Trusts to success in their EAL provision.
Sally writes teaching materials for CGP Publishers, including their EAL Workbooks for Primary and for Secondary schools, as well as their online resources.
She is a member of NALDIC (National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum), she has a certificate in bilingualism from Birmingham University and has completed a course in DysTEFL (Dyslexia teaching English as a Foreign Language) from Lancaster University. Sally has specialised in second language acquisition, having supported many children through the 'New to English' stages of learning English, including many new to schooling and with special educational needs and disabilities.
"The school’s international unit in Key Stage 2 is very effective. Pupils attend the provision if they arrive at the school with little or no English. The teacher’s high expectations and expertise enables pupils to gain quickly a good knowledge of English grammar. Pupils make rapid progress..." Berridge Junior School OfSTED (2017).
In another city school the aim was to address common errors to create maximum academic impact and to develop a global community school ethos to motivate children and engage parents:
"Pupils and staff celebrate the diversity of the school community. Leaders work hard to establish effective communication with parents. Parents support the school through checking the multi-lingual signs around the school and helping to plan an ‘International Day’. Pupils appreciate parents’ presentations about cultures from around the world. They enjoy sharing the variety of languages that they speak with each other through the ‘Languages Club’. They are proud to be part of a school which values different cultures, explaining, ‘If there wasn’t difference in the world, how would we grow and change as human beings?’ " Windmill (L.E.A.D.) Academy OfSTED Report February 2019.
In addition, Sally has been involved in delivering EAL immersion day training for groups of PGCE students at the University of Nottingham.
She enjoys delivering practical and interactive CPD sessions, including 'Assessment and Progression through the Nottingham Framework for Languages', 'Differentiating curriculum Lessons for EAL language stages', 'Vocabulary building for the new to English', 'New to English and new to schooling - where to begin', 'Valuing first languages and motivation', 'Reading Comprehension for EAL Language Stages', 'Activities to address common EAL errors', 'Using InPrint3 to support EAL and SEND learning: modelled sentences, sentence substitution and jumbled sentences.
Cristina Taylor
Cristina has been working with English for speakers of other languages for over 15 years. She is originally from Brazil where she graduated in Linguistics and Language Teaching. She has completed a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course by The University of Cambridge, she also has a Diploma in Foreign Language Teaching, a PGCE in Modern Languages and a Masters Degree in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from The University of Nottingham, with her dissertation entitled ‘Can a teacher make or break primary school EAL pupils’ motivation?’.
She has a vast experience of teaching English to speakers of other languages. She began her career teaching English as a Foreign Language to primary school children in her native Brazil as well as English for Specific Purposes to adults (such as international exams, academic English, business English, etc). Following her move to the UK in 2011, she worked for ten years in an inner city school with higher than national average number of EAL pupils (89%) in Nottingham, where she has taught over 300 Key Stage 2 children from a variety of language levels, skills and needs, not only helping these pupils to “make rapid progress” (Berridge Junior School OfSTED Report 2017), but also helping the school to become a reference in EAL teaching.
Apart from thoroughly enjoying teaching pupils, she also developed a new passion: sharing what she has learnt throughout the years from research and practice by delivering CPD sessions/staff training on EAL teaching and writing a EAL exercise books (published by CGP). Cristina is now focusing on EAL teaching in secondary school and is currently developing her research and teaching practice with Key Stage 3 and 4 students in a school in Nottingham.
