Chunking is really important for EAL learners. To make concepts, tasks or activities more comprehensible and meaningful we must chunk our information. Think of the image above, rather than deliver the entire block of information, chunk your message into manageable parts.
Through chunking, or breaking things down into more manageable parts, we help reduce the cognitive and linguistic load and make our message more comprehensible. Think of a time that you spoke at length about something but your EAL learners did not fully comprehend what you had said, if you had used chunking as a classroom strategy your message would have been more manageable to your EAL learners.
It is vital that we as teachers monitor the amount of teacher talk we use with our EAL learners, too much and our message is not understood. Concepts, tasks or activities that are chunked are more easily understood and meanigful.
A good idea is to record yourself so that you can monitor if you have used chunking. Through practice and effective chunking we become far better teachers of EAL learners.
EAL in the Daylight 