EAL Morning Tea Celebration

Morning tea celebration - as part of Cultural Week

How lovely, if crowded, it was to have so many of our EAL students come to celebrate each other and all that they bring to University High School at a morning tea in the library.

EAL - English as an Additional Language - is a program offered to students whose first language (and sometimes their 2nd, 3rd or 4th!) is not English and who are relatively newly arrived in Australia. In reality, many of our EAL students have been here just a few months and do an amazing job of fitting in and working hard to learn. Whilst this morning tea was the first to bring EAL students from all year levels together, it won't be the last.

At the event we remembered that there are over 70 languages spoken at home within our very diverse community. We shared food from around the world with our EAL teachers - also from diverse cultural backgrounds - sharing food from Slovakia, Israel, Greece and Taiwan to name but a few. Students also brought in food to share from places such as Ukraine, China, Malaysia and Ethiopia - we hope in future years to open this sharing of culture even further.

Importantly, we used the morning tea as an opportunity to launch EAL Ambassadors. This is to provide a warm and familiar contact for new students when they arrive at our school. These ambassadors will be students who speak languages in addition to English and who would like to volunteer their services to welcome students who arrive from other countries with a shared language background. After all who better to remember how it feels to arrive at a new school with limited English than our EAL superstars? If you know a student who might like to do this please encourage them to come and see me at the 

English/EAL office. 

Lisa Shukroon - EAL Coordinator