Classroom routines when half the class is still learning English

There's a particular kind of silence that happens when you give an instruction to a class with a wide spread of English. Not the good silence. The one where four children start, six look at the four who started, and the rest look at you.

Nobody in that room is being difficult. They just didn't have enough English to catch the instruction at the speed it was given, and now they're doing the sensible thing — waiting to see what everyone else does.

If you teach in an international school, or in a UK classroom with a high proportion of EAL learners, this is the constraint that shapes everything else. Not the curriculum. Not behaviour. The fact that any routine which depends on understanding spoken English at full speed will quietly exclude a third of your class every single time you run it.

The test: could a new arrival follow it on day one?

Here's the question worth asking of every routine in your room. A child who joined yesterday, with almost no English — could they work out what to do by watching?

For a lot of classroom systems, the honest answer is no.

• "Put your homework in the tray if you've done it" — depends entirely on hearing and parsing the sentence.
• A points chart with names written in cursive — unreadable if you're still learning the alphabet.
• "We're on the carpet in a minute" — a minute is an idiom before it's a unit of time.
• A jobs board where the jobs are written but not pictured — a wall of text that means nothing.

None of those are bad routines. They're just routines that assume a level of English that a good chunk of the room doesn't have yet.

What survives: visual, positional, repeated

The routines that work in an EAL-heavy classroom tend to share three properties.

They're visible, not spoken. The information lives somewhere the child can look at repeatedly, at their own pace, rather than in a sentence that happened once. A child who missed the instruction can recover by looking. A child who missed a spoken instruction can only recover by asking — which is exactly the thing a nervous new arrival won't do.

They're in the same place every day. Position carries meaning when language can't. If today's schedule is always top-left of the board, a child learns that's where the day lives long before they can read a word of it. Move it around and you've spent that learning for nothing.

They repeat until they're boring. For a child acquiring English, repetition isn't tedium — it's the whole mechanism. The fifth time they see the same visual for "get your reading book", they're not just following it, they're acquiring "reading book". Routines are language lessons that don't look like language lessons.

Practical swaps that cost you nothing

You don't need to rebuild your classroom. Most of the gains come from small substitutions.

Swap names for faces. A points chart or a jobs board that uses a photo or an avatar next to each name is instantly readable by a child who can't yet read names. This is genuinely the single highest-value change on this list, and it costs nothing.

Give the day a picture. A visual timetable is standard practice in EYFS and then mysteriously disappears by Year 3. In an EAL classroom it shouldn't. Children who can't yet follow "after break we're doing Maths" can absolutely follow a row of icons.

Model it, don't explain it. Do the thing while they watch, then have a confident child do it while everyone watches, then release. Three rounds of that beats any amount of explaining — and it works identically for a child with strong English and one with none.

Use sentence stems on the wall, permanently. Not for a lesson — permanently. "I think… because…", "Can you say that again please?", "I don't understand yet." That third one especially. A child who has a stem for admitting confusion will use it; a child who doesn't will go quiet.

Make turn-taking visibly fair. Cold calling is good practice, but in a mixed-English room it can read as targeting if a child can't tell how they were picked. Something visibly random — or visibly weighted towards children who haven't been asked recently — takes the sting out of it. We put a free name picker on this site for exactly that; there's a group maker too, which saves the "who's in my group?" confusion that eats five minutes of every paired task.

Where this gets hard

Two honest difficulties, because pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

A visual routine takes longer to set up than a spoken one. Making the icons, printing them, laminating them, replacing them when they fall off — that's real time, in September, when you have none. The upside is that it's front-loaded: you build it once and it runs all year. The downside is that it's front-loaded in the worst possible week.

Wide spreads are harder than uniform low levels. A class where everyone is at a similar early stage is, in some ways, easier to plan for than one with three children who are essentially native speakers and five who arrived last month. The second class is the normal one in international schools, and it means most routines need to work at two levels at once without being patronising to either.

There's no clean solution to that. The best I've found is making the routine fully visual while keeping the content pitched properly — so the mechanics never exclude anyone, and the thinking is still hard enough for the children who need it to be.

The connected version

Most of this is analogue and should stay that way. But the part that genuinely benefits from being on a screen is anything that changes daily, because that's the part where the laminated version drifts out of date and stops being trustworthy.

That's a large part of why Classroom Hub looks the way it does. Every child gets an avatar they pick themselves, which follows them across the homework board, the points chart and their profile — so the class list is readable by a child who can't yet read names. The class dashboard puts the day's schedule, birthdays and jobs in the same position every morning. And the name picker on the board can weight towards children who haven't been asked recently, so fairness is something the class can see rather than something they have to take on trust.

It won't teach anyone English. But it means the running of your room stops being one more thing that requires English to participate in.

Try it with your own class: Classroom Hub is built by teachers working in international schools, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required.