The ‘how long’ question: language learning trajectories of EAL learners in NSW schools
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Nearly one quarter of students in Australian schools are learning English as an additional language (EAL). However, despite international research, and one Australian study, there is limited direct evidence of the length of time required for EAL students in Australia to develop the English necessary to access the curriculum in the same ways as their non-EAL peers. This article reports on outcomes from a large-scale project that investigated this issue. The project involved analysis of NAPLAN results in reading and writing from EAL students in NSW public schools from 2014 to 2022, and was supported by NSW Department of Education. The article outlines the challenges and methodological decisions involved in undertaking research of this nature, including the use of propensity score matching to control for the possibility of confounding factors. Results from the research confirm the overall length of time required for EAL students to develop high levels of academic English; they provide evidence of students’ progress in academic writing in comparison to reading; and they show the impact of students’ different starting levels on their overall progression in academic English. The results are significant and enable conclusions to be drawn regarding the length and continuity of language and literacy support needed by EAL students; allocation of resources across schools in response to students’ needs; and the professional support needed by teachers who are working with EAL students in their mainstream classes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it