Across Cultures début the Learning Village at GESS 2016

EAL/ESL specialist, Across Cultures, will be showing the Learning Village – an online English language-learning portal for new-to-English learning across the curriculum, at GESS this year on stand M81 at the World Trade Center in Dubai from 1st – 3rd March.

The Learning Village provides support for teachers in the mainstream to help cater for new-to-English learners by offering an online portal that allows teachers to enrol, manage and track learners with beginner-intermediate English language, curriculum vocabulary and Phonics English language requirements.

The Learning Village can be used to pre-teach Curriculum language (including Science, Maths and Humanities content) and already provides over 100+ curriculum language lessons with more being added every day. Teachers can assign these specialist language lessons to their learners in the Learning Village teacher area, where they can also optionally track learner progress, print flashcards for any of the 800+ lessons, and to help motivate learners, send messages and gifts, and print certificates.

Whilst learners can log-in to the Learning Village independently, teachers can provide EAL/ESL support by using it in schools, and with regular communication provided by the Across Cultures staff for best practice, feedback ratifies that the Learning Village is saving time by providing ready-made, customised resources for teachers. These resources help increase teacher capacity to support a greater number of learners as well as improve learner progress throughout mainstream subjects. Schools are further assisting learners by strengthening home-school bonds with family learning sessions.

Wood End Academy are an example school in the UK that are making excellent progress with one learner, 9 years old, making 3 years and 4 months progress in reading comprehension age after 5 months using the Learning Village and Across Cultures resources. Another learner at Wood End, 10 years old, made 3 years and 8 months progress in reading comprehension age after just 3 months using the Learning Village and Across Cultures resources.

This will be the first time Across Cultures has attended GESS. Caroline Scott, director said “The Learning Village is really picking up steam, and the results speak for themselves – we’re looking forward to showing what the Village can do across the Middle East at GESS and also how to differentiate for language learning across the curriculum in general.”.

Across Cultures also offer training courses for leaders interested in developing language learning across the curriculum within their school, and will be available to discuss EAL/ESL needs and demonstrate the Learning Village at the show.