Activity:
When you have an exercise in which students have to order certain events or tasks, consider writing a few sentences in some of the home languages of that class. As a result the multilingual EAL learners will be needed to complete the exercise as they will have to translate it to their peers. A powerful inclusive activity in which the EAL learners can link key vocabulary with their home language and they will feel valued for their linguistic abilities.
If you are not sure about Google’s translations, students will gladly help you correct it.
The example below is taken from a recent Shakespeare activity for Year 8 but you could do this activity with recipes in cooking, the rock cycle in Geography, the water cycle in Science, a history timeline, etc.
To avoid funny translations, ask a student who speaks that language for help and/or pick the least grammatically complex sentences that don’t have words with multiple meanings in it.
EAL-time 
Such a great idea to showcase the EAL students’ talents as multilingual students. Used for the HA leaners vs beginners as they would need to be able to comprehend the other english sentences to know where their language sentence would fit. Love this – def. going to try it. Thaks
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This is a wonderful way to integrate other languages into the curriculum. It’s also good for encouraging team work, and gives a voice/kudos/center stage to the students whose English may not be particularly strong yet. The only problem is finding texts accurately translated into other languages – I’m not sure I trust Google translate.
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Love this idea, and can’t wait to try it. At my school we are looking for ways to use and celebrate the children’s mother tongues, and this looks like a great way to do that. I like the idea of children being experts as a result of their first language knowledge
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Thanks for sharing this creative way to encourage students to value each other’s languages!
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This is a brilliant idea and so easy to implement. The confidence students would get in being involved in planning the lesson – so worth it.
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A great idea and appreciate how you put in examples of putting this into practice. Will try it out this week with my Grade 6’s for a timeline on Mesopotamia.
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