Bridging the Vocabulary Gap: Using GenAI to Support EALD Students

This is a practice run of my upcoming presentation for the UNESCO event entitled 'Harnessing Emerging Technologies to Support Language Inclusion'.

EALD students face a persistent vocabulary gap that limits their access to curriculum content. I'll present a pilot study investigating whether a generative AI tool can support multilingual primary students' academic vocabulary development through personalised, conversational pre-teaching aligned with the NSW science curriculum. With data collection still underway (n = 24 so far), preliminary results showed significantly gains for trained vocabulary compared to untrained words.