Is it all really so bad? Reasons to be positive about the future of EAL.

So much of what I read about EAL practice comes across negatively. Perhaps this is because a lot of the things I read about are grounded in the British education system, where EAL has historically been neglected, moved to the margins of relevance by governments nervous about spending money on immigrants.

But, I think there are actually reasons to be positive about the future of EAL, because there is one domain where this field of education is gaining traction, and that is the field of international schooling.

Perhaps I don’t need to say it out loud, but here goes nothing: British international schools are different to domestic British schools. We’re now quite familiar with the idea that international schools are, actually, very often not so ‘international’, at least in terms of their student cohorts. It’s relatively unusual, it seems, to find an international school that truly is a blamange of nationalities. It’s more likely to overwhelmingly serve host country national, perhaps with additional groups of students added in. For example, in Vietnam, international schools overwhelmingly serve Vietnamese students, with large groups of South Korean students added in as a result of local recruitment in local businesses.

And so on.