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Lyndee Bakes
EAL/D Advisory Visiting Teacher, Education Queensland
In the beginning and emerging phases, oracy is the foundation of reading and writing. So we need to give a significant amount of time for children to hear, understand and use their new language. I love using oracy games as it gives a context for the new language and also it’s a fun reason to listen and speak.
Alicia Smith
Primary EAL/D teacher, Education Queensland
This can be followed up by a joint construction of a text that uses the oral language from the conversations around the experience and then the teacher can model how to represent that oral language in sentences in a text. Those texts can then be used as meaningful literacy activities such as reading comprehension, cloze activities, and writing activities, all based around that familiar meaningful text that the children helped to write based on the shared experience.
Gae Nastasi
EAL/D Coordinator, Education Queensland
Teachers can use sentence frames that model the grammar of sentences which are specific to the learning area. For example, in science, "I think this will happen because..." and students insert the content which is appropriate. This helps to cement the learning area vocabulary.
Lyndee Bakes
EAL/D Advisory Visiting Teacher, Education Queensland
In the developing and consolidating phases EAL/D students need to know how to use the new academic vocabulary that’s being introduced. So, we need to support them with the corresponding grammar. For example, in a noun group there’s a word order for the describing words or there’s different ways to use adverbs or circumstances.
Alicia Smith
Primary EAL/D teacher, Education Queensland
Teachers can build up word banks with students to build academic language and sort the words into categories based on the topic area or the subject area. So you might have all of your maths vocabulary on one wall, and you may have all your science vocabulary on another wall, and you would continue to add words with pictures, images, showing the way that the words connect to each other, the relationships of words to each other, to help students be able to retrieve and build on the academic language that they have learned and be able to continue to use that and refer to it.
Gae Nastasi
EAL/D Coordinator, Education Queensland
It’s important to explicitly model the text type and to analyse the salient language features of the learning area. Each subject area has its own grammar, its own vocabulary, and its own way of organising knowledge, and it is vital that this is explicitly taught to students for them to be successful.
Associate Professor Jennifer Alford
Faculty of Education, QUT
We call this curriculum literacies and that is how language behaves in your subject areas. And when you know how language works at the vocabulary level, the grammar level, the genre level, the text mode level, in your different subject areas that you teach you can then build in focus on that language and help EAL/D learners progress through the phases of language learning.
More information
Further information and ideas for supporting teaching and learning can be found in the EAL/D supporting resources list (PDF, 267.7 KB).
- Last updated:
- 22 July 2025
