Supporting EAL Learners: Strategies for Inclusion, by Peter Clements and Adrienn Szlapak
Review by Christopher Walker
There are too many acronyms in our industry, and these acronyms proliferate like bacteria. EFL and ELT are roughly interchangeable, EFL and ESL are often confused, and I still roll my eyes when I am told that someone is a TEFL teacher. Acronyms shift, too; the CELTA that I completed in 2006 is not the CELTA of 2025 - there isn’t even a word beginning with A in the current meaning of CELTA!
ESL was never a good term - English as a Second Language assumed that its speakers came from a monolingual background, which for many is simply not the case. ESOL is a bit better - English for Speakers of Other Languages; but many will complain about the othering of native tongues that it implies, or that it is only one letter away from ESL but uses a different s-word in the middle, as if just to be contrary or stubborn.
Best of all is EAL, the acronym used by Clements and Szlapak in this new book by DELTA Publishing. English as an Additional Language solves the problems of both ESL and ESOL, and I encourage my readers to adopt it wherever appropriate. But it is not interchangeable with EFL, just to be clear - as the authors state in the opening section of this smart and useful book, English as a Foreign Language applies to teachers like myself who teach English in a country where English is not considered among the official native tongues. English as an Additional Language should refer to contexts where English is taught to students whose home language is not English, but where education is delivered through English (and this might take place either in an English-speaking territory like the USA, or one where the school system allows for some kind of bilingual education, like Szlapak’s Hungary).
Which brings us to a host of other acronyms - CLIL, STEM, EMI… But at this stage I fear I am about to lose my reader…
One of the other articles in Issue 54 of the IH Journal is Adam Lewis’s piece on EAL and the pull-out approach that he defends. Readers familiar with the debate will benefit from Supporting EAL Learners, which goes into just the right amount of detail on the different approaches that fall under the EAL umbrella.
It is very important that the book does this. Coming back - briefly - to those earlier acronyms, we find there are entry-level qualifications that underpin each one. If you want to become an EFL teacher, get the CELTA. If you want to teach EFL in an EAL setting, the CELTA will also provide you with much of the knowledge you need. But for the kinds of EAL that Clements and Szlapak discuss here - such as providing support to students in Biology lessons delivered in English - there are few, if any, standardised, acknowledged qualifications. Definitions of the role and its attendant responsibilities vary from institution to institution. Just as there is no real agreement on whether we should use ESL, ESOL, or EAL, there is no real agreement on what EAL teachers should know before they enter the classroom.
There is overlap between Supporting EAL Learners and, say, Scrivener’s classic Learning Teaching. While the latter is aimed at a general audience of English teachers (EFL if you will), Clements and Szlapak frame everything in the context of the kinds of material that EAL teachers are most likely to encounter. When talking about giving instructions, they take an example from geography and the difference between urban and rural; while the EFL teacher will benefit from this, the EAL teacher will be able to apply the example in their own teaching. All of this means that any teacher who wants to get into EAL should read this book - though there’s nothing wrong with starting with Scrivener!
There are some stand-out sections in this book. One that I thought really hit home was the third unit, which looks at Further Vocabulary Development. The authors’ treatment of synonyms, and their suggestions for helping the learner look beyond the superficial meaning of words, are all absolutely excellent, and music to this particular teacher’s ears - I am rather tired of people making decontextualised lists of so-called synonyms, so Clements and Szlapak’s perspective is definitely one I agree with more. In fact, though I do not teach EAL, I can see a lot of these ideas making their way into future Professional Development sessions at my EFL-grounded school.
The subsequent chapter, Developing Speaking Skills, is also crammed full of excellent activities, all with an EAL spin. Some of these might not survive the transition into mainstream EFL, or would only work with classes that possessed some subject knowledge or had the advanced language resources to make the most of them. For instance, most EFL teachers will be familiar with the idea of using a picture of variable terrain (coastline yielding to mountains, yielding to a kind of sierra) to introduce and practice topical vocabulary - but the activity here leads to a discussion on the relative suitability of different terrain types for human settlement. While such a discussion would be an exciting one to have, I can’t imagine anyone lower than C1 level being capable of contributing much to it; here the difference between EFL and EAL is clear.
After this point in the book, though, there is less and less overlap between EAL and EFL. The chapter on writing, while perfect for students in iGCSE settings, or, in EFL, for students preparing for the Academic IELTS, will offer less to the EFL reader. Writing here is academic, formal, and far less transactional than most of the contexts that EFL explores. Though the activities are certainly worthwhile, and the guidance is detailed and actionable, there could be less here for those working outside EAL - and the same is true for the chapter on Working With Texts.
The chapter on Inclusivity is one of the most thought-provoking and is definitely where I would recommend that would-be EAL practitioners begin. To be an inclusive and effective EAL teacher, you might need to be skilled in the usual suite of EFL skills, but also possess subject-specific knowledge (someone lacking any familiarity with STEM vocabulary will not be able to help students understand that vocabulary - and STEM is full of specific and technical vocabulary!) as well as some knowledge of the languages spoken by the students in the classroom. The book gives the example of a classroom where one student uses Spanish to express their understanding (and the teacher knows enough Spanish to understand), and another student, this time Chinese, attempts an explanation that also relies on their L1, though with far less success.
I think this is rather profound. Most EAL teachers who started in EFL - and I have met a fair few - quite possibly have some knowledge of a romance language like Spanish, French, or Italian, or perhaps German. One of these was probably a part of their secondary school syllabus. Sometimes you meet an EFL teacher who knows something about the Slavic tongues. But in the fifteen years I’ve spent at my school, I’ve only met one or two teachers who knew Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic, and who would be able to provide the sort of inclusive support that I feel is implied by Clements and Szlapak.
So who, then, would make for a good EAL teacher? I think that EFL is the kind of field that people can fall into and still make a success of. I count myself among such teachers - I studied Physics for my first degree, and had somehow ended up working in retail before taking my CELTA. I didn’t choose to move my life to Poland - I ended up here, and then settled. Does the same pathway make sense for those who wish to enter EAL? So much is demanded of the job that I think it requires more will and determination - there should be enough in the EAL teacher’s background to help them make the move. An interest in the subjects they might be teaching, certainly, but at least a basic knowledge of the students’ mother tongue(s) - I think these are foundational to efficient and effective EAL instruction.
To draw this review to a close, then, I would recommend Supporting EAL Learners to anyone and everyone, whether they are EAL teachers or not. Regular EFL teachers will benefit from the recontextualisation of many of the fundamental ideas of English language teaching - meeting things like giving clear instructions from a different perspective will help all teachers. And for EAL teachers, I can think of few other resources that do such a good job of preparing you for the classroom.
This is a book that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf.