Author Description

For the past 3 years NRDC researchers have explored effective teaching practices in reading, writing, numeracy, ESOL and ICT, in order to understand what enables learners to make progress and become more positive about their learning. The researchers assessed attainment and attitudes, interviewed learners and teachers, observed the strategies used by teachers, and correlated those strategies with changes in learners' attainment and attitudes. The findings are based on observation over 1000 learners and 1000's of hours of teaching. The research investigated approaches to teaching ESOL. It aimed to identify the extent of learners' progress, and to establish correlations between this progress and the strategies and practices used by teachers. Table of contents: * Contexts, aims and methodology (contexts of ESOL, criteria for assessing what is effective in ESOL teaching and learning) * A world of difference: local characteristics of the providers and the classes (ESOL providers, the range of ESOL classes, the range of students' backgrounds in classes, mixed-level classes, community and constraints) * The learners and their experience (themes from interviews, learners on their ESOL classrooms and their progress) * Learners' progress (assessment and learners' progress) * Take 40 teachers: ESOL teachers' working lives (changing contexts for ESOL teaching and learning, balancing and juggling competing demands, ESOL teachers' stance, professional life histories and professional learning histories, a safe environment for learning, planning and sequencing, methodology and materials) * Take 40 classrooms: teaching and learning strategies in the classrooms observed (general teaching strategies, strategies for learner involvement, combining general teaching strategies and strategies for learners involvement scales, specific teaching strategies) * Telling cases: ten classroom case studies (the ten case studies, balancing conflicting demands, classroom ecology, learners' voices and classroom talk, planning and continuity, contextualisation, inside / outside, collaborative learning, what is not done much, 'professional vision') * Conclusions, implications and recommendations (learners and their progress, ESOL provision and outside factors, what ESOL classes look like, ESOL pedagogy and quality, limitations, implications and recommendations).