English as an Additional Language

​EAL Mission Statement 

The English as an Additional Language (EAL) program works to provide equal educational access to English learners at AST. By employing all invested participants (students, parents, and educators) to share responsibility in the development of a student’s linguistic, academic, and cognitive skills, English learners will participate in an academically rigorous, high standards language learning program to become competitive global citizens at AST and beyond.
Ms. Catherine Stark,
​EAL Specialist

EAL Program Philosophy

At AST, we believe:
  • Celebrating cultural and linguistic diversity is crucial in fostering an inclusive learning environment and in empowering all students to be successful. 
  • Diversity of home languages brings added value to the classroom environment.
  • English learners should be provided with comprehensible input and held to the same high academic standards as native speaking peers.
  • Students learn English best when they are in a safe, immersive and inclusive environment and feel comfortable taking risks. 
  • Having a strong foundation of one’s first language promotes connections to a student’s new language.
  • Parental involvement is key to student success. 
  • Every teacher is a language teacher. ​​

Our EAL Program                                                                    

The EAL program is based on the WIDA English Language Development Standards. These standards support college and career readiness goals in all subjects including mathematics, science and language arts. Language acquisition and proficiency is a long-term process, with learners moving through developmental stages at varying rates. Current language acquisition methodologies indicate students learn language best when they interact meaningfully in the immersive language-rich environment of their mainstream classroom. In order to be successful in the classroom and expand their proficiency levels in the domains of speaking, listening, reading and writing, our English learners are supported in a variety of ways.
 
The EAL Specialist supports English learners in Grades 1-8  by:
  • co-teaching and co-planning with the homeroom or subject teachers
  • working with small groups or individual students in the classroom
  • providing small group or one-to-one sessions for Emergent English learners for a designated period of time. In these sessions, students learn and practice targeted vocabulary, structures, and language functions that they will need to access the content curricula 
  • creating differentiated materials and resources to use in class to access grade level content
  • developing and monitoring unique individualized language learning plans to improve proficiency across the four domains.
 

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