18 February 2026
In this episode of Teach we explore effective strategies for supporting Aboriginal EALD (English as an Additional Language or Dialect) learners in South Australia. Our guests highlight approaches such as explicit teaching, translanguaging, and leveraging students' first languages and cultural backgrounds through co-teaching and culturally responsive practices. The episode also outlines the resources available through the EALD hub, including online modules, coaching and professional learning communities. Educators are encouraged to keep learning, collaborate and use these supports to enhance teaching and learning outcomes for Aboriginal EALD students across the state.
Show Notes
Teaching learners of English as an additional language or dialect (EALD) – staff login required
SA EAL/D hub e-books – staff login required
https://saealdhub.powerhousehub.net/learner/ebooks
Transcript
Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today we're joined by people from all over the state, and we're talking about EALD as a discipline and how we support our Aboriginal learners in their education. Firstly, Rose Nyaramba. Welcome.
Rose Nyaramba: Thank you.
Dale Atkinson: Now, Rose, where are you from? You're an EALD coach. What does that mean?
Rose Nyaramba: Both a coach and a project officer. But as a coach, I work with teachers who teach Aboriginal EALD learners and support them to implement effective EALD strategies.
Dale Atkinson: Now, and two of the people that you support to implement effective EALD strategies are Brooke Webb, who's joining us from Mimili Aṉangu School. Brooke, how are you?
Brooke Webb: Yeah. I'm going. Great. Really great. Thank you.
Dale Atkinson: That's great. Tell us a bit about Mimili as a school. What's that like?
Brooke Webb: Yeah. So we're, Mimili Aṉangu School in the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands, so in the far north of South Australia, we’re 1200 kilometres from Adelaide. And we teach, 100% EALD learners who either speak Aboriginal-English, Yankunytjatjara or Pitjantjatjara as their first languages.
Dale Atkinson: And we're also joined by Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard, who's a teacher at Avenues College. Tell us a bit about Avenues, Kelsey.
Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: Avenues is a small school in Windsor Gardens. We've got about 400 students all up. We have a large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and we also have the Wiltja Boarding program. So students from the APY Lands, Coober Pedy, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara some of them.
So quite a diverse group of kids from South Australia. And we’ve got some boarding from the Northern Territory as well.
Dale Atkinson: Fantastic. Thank you, Kelsey. Now Rose, let's start initially on what is an EALD learner. How do we define that?
Rose Nyaramba: So, an EALD learner is a student who speaks other languages and who is learning English as an additional language. These students are not yet proficient in standard Australian English, and so they need extra support so that they can access the curriculum.
Dale Atkinson: And what does research tell us about how we can support these learners best? What is it that we should be doing as an education system, an educator should be doing to support these, these young people?
Rose Nyaramba: So they’re evidence-based strategies and pedagogy that is effective when teaching these, these learners. And so part of what we do with the teachers is to support them with these strategies. So, you know, explicit teaching, using of - using scaffolds, using first languages to develop standard Australian English. And so they it's a whole range of strategies that not just work for these learners but would work for other students as well.
Dale Atkinson: So I guess what you're trying to do within this space is ensure that, you know, the learning experience for young people, their identity is factored into the teaching strategies that we use. Would that be fair to say?
Rose Nyaramba: Yes. So we come from a strength-based model where we feel the students’ culture and languages as assets that they bring to developing standard Australian English. And a lot of the pedagogy is also culturally responsive. So, you know, the educators sort of learn about these students’ languages, their cultures and how to work cross-culturally with their colleagues who are often from Aboriginal cultures.
Dale Atkinson: So Brooke, out in the APY Lands, at Mimili, what does that look like at your school?
Brooke Webb: Yeah. So at Mimili we have a co-teaching model. So there's, an Aṉangu educator or several Aṉangu educators in the classroom working really closely with the teacher, the non- Aṉangu teacher often. So in our classroom, translanguaging is a really essential part of what we do across all learning areas.
So that's working between languages which happens while we're co-teaching. So we do that by explicitly planning together that tier two and three vocabulary for our teaching and learning cycles in both languages. So the students’ first language plays a really big part throughout the teaching and learning cycle, especially when we're building the field of the topic knowledge so that students, as Rose spoke about, can use their full, linguistic funds and backgrounds to enhance communication both in standard Australian English and in their home languages.
Because as we know, students are learning English in English and about English topics. So the cognitive load is massive. So if we can actively support that process through translanguaging, that will lessen the cognitive load. And it also allows students to make prior knowledge connections to their home language. For example, we had this incredible, ‘burrowing frogs’ unit that we did. And we started the unit by looking at some images of frogs and students were using every day, you know, language in English saying things like, “oh, they have big eyes, they have long legs, they live in the water”.
But Marisa and Penny and I, our teaching team, we wanted to bring in the tier two and three language. So we sat down, and we talked about what that looks like in both languages and then provided the multiple exposures to be able to practice that vocabulary orally first as well as written. So we were doing things like barrier games, creating dioramas, diagrams as well.
And learning on country that was led by the Aṉangu educators played a really big part in that process as well. As well as using the mentor and model texts both in standard Australian English and in Pitjantjatjara as well. And so by the end of the unit, students were saying things like “enormous bulging eyes and their strong hind legs”, and that “they live in freshwater habitats”, improving up to two leap levels. So it's yeah, a very, very effective strategy.
Dale Atkinson: And so that sounds like a really, kind of, integrated approach for you. So what does that look like in terms of you working with your two colleagues? What are you doing on a day-to-day basis to kind of design the learning and teaching for the kids?
Brooke Webb: Totally. So on a day-to-day basis where the learning we have, our learning intentions and our success criteria that we go in, but we're also very flexible in responding to what the learners, what the learners need, what they're telling us, and knowledge that Aṉangu educators have as well, that might come up organically in the learning process. So that is evident, especially when we're learning on Country that, yeah, we're flexible when we're adapting to what the students, what the students and the staff are bringing to to the learning environment at the time
Dale Atkinson: And what's the journey been like in terms of trying to integrate the program as a bilingual program? Obviously, that's been, a tremendous amount of work. How's that going?
Brooke Webb: Yeah, it's going it's going really, really well. It's still an evolving program. But I think in my experience over the last four years, Marissa Penney and I, we've yeah, we've been a really strong team working together and building that trusting relationship to be able to explore new things has been probably the main, the main focus.
It’s keeping that relationship really strong so that we have the trust to grow together.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah, fantastic, Brooke. It sounds like such an exciting thing to be involved in. Kelsey. It's obviously a different situation and scenario at Avenues College, where you've got a much broader and more diverse group of students. What is the program and the support within the EALD hub gonna look like at Avenues?
Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: We do encourage teachers to try and incorporate first languages as much as possible, which can be a little bit daunting I think for a lot of teachers. So we work with the EALD hub coach to think of strategies and ways to do that respectfully and effectively.
We've also got a lot of students who are interested in learning, Kaurna, so there’s quite an interesting combination of different Aboriginal languages. I've worked with my coach to create some different activities where we’ve embedded both languages and basically just trying to encourage the students to be the experts in some of those fields and share their knowledge, rather than feeling like they don't know as much as a student who knows standard Australian English.
We've had a couple of really interesting moments where it's been amazing to see students who speak Pitjantjatjara for example, using their understanding of things like mythology to explain to their classmates in language what the connections between gods are, and explaining processes in short stories, in language to their peers, and then the other students who don't speak the language are really interested to learn more and try and learn to work with those.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it sounds really exciting. What has been the change in your teaching practice as a result of working with the coach from the from the hub?
Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: I think a lot of it is like having that broader perspective and stopping before I put something out, like a scaffold and thinking about, is this actually giving students the information that they need, is it pitched at the right level, have I covered what I need to, and making sure that it's actually giving them the understanding rather than overloading with lots of language, because it's like a multi-layered process that's got to be able to translate what you're saying and also learn about the concept. So taking those smaller steps.
Dale Atkinson: Sounds like it’s a really incredibly useful resource. Rose, what are the supports and help that's available through the through the hub?
Rose Nyaramba: So we've got an online resource that is – they are modules that teachers can walk through independently. And that's, you know, generally about the students, their languages, how people learn an additional language and effective strategies for teaching English – Standard Australian English – as an additional language. And then there's the component that has got the coach.
So the coach then works one-on-one with teachers. And again, it is usually to support them to plan using a teaching and learning cycle and to implement those teaching strategies. And then the last one is teachers form a professional learning community. And so they meet up. You know, it depends on what the school allocates.
And teachers discuss, you know, share their learning from those modules that are in the in the EALD online resource.
Dale Atkinson: So who's at the end of the phone when an educator picks it up and dials into the hub? Who can they expect to speak to?
Rose Nyaramba: They can speak to Vanessa, who is the other project officer. They can speak to myself, and we've got our managers. There's a whole team of people in, you know, our project that they can speak to.
Dale Atkinson: Yeah. Fantastic. Now, Brooke, what advice would you give to any educators out there who are thinking about kind of approaching the education in a different way in this space or perhaps are new to it? What advice would you give them?
Brooke Webb: I would say to keep learning by connecting with others, that we don't have to have all the answers straightaway. I know the first - when I first started working with the EALD hub team, and I heard the words ‘subordinate clause’ I thought, oh my goodness, what am I in for here? So it can seem overwhelming at first, but we are so lucky to be supported by so many amazing resources and people.
So just to keep learning, keep reading and try the new things that you learn as well, which you know, can be challenging, but I've been so lucky to be supported by my amazing coach, Rose, who’s yeah, really pushed me and challenged me to try new things, which have been best for my own practice, but also for the students. So to keep learning, I would say and learning with others.
Dale Atkinson: Thank you very much. I know you've all got to nip back into class times and get back to the core bit of your job. But thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about the EALD hub. There are some notes within the show notes just to let educators know, where you might be able to access this and who you can speak to Rose or her colleagues. So lovely. So, Rose, Brooke, Kelsey, thank you very much for your time.
Kelsey Geyer-Pritchard: Thank you.
Rose Nyaramba: Thank you.
Brooke Webb: Thank you so much.
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