Classroom support strategies for English as an additional language or dialect students with developmental language disorder: A scoping review

Australia's population is rich in cultural and linguistic diversity. Given the steady growth of migrant populations, English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) is common throughout all Australian schools. This scoping review seeks to explore the existing international literature regarding effective support for EAL/D students in classrooms with developmental language disorder (DLD). Due to the high prevalence of both EAL/D and DLD in the Australian context, and the expected intersectionality between EAL/D and DLD, the findings of this review represent an important contribution to existing scholarship as they identify and explicitly define 11 instructional practices that can be implemented within the classroom to support the English language development of the target population. The aim of the review, therefore, was to identify and analyse available literature specifically reporting on effective strategies and instructional practices to support EAL/D students with DLD from January 2008 to May 2025. The JBI System for the Unified Management, Assessment and Review of Information was used to support the scoping methodology, and 14 articles were reported on in full after a thorough screening process. Qualitative content analysis was employed and led to the inductive development of categories and themes that provided information on clear classroom support strategies for the target population. These strategies included implicit and explicit teaching, push-in and pull-out models, curriculum alignment, recasting, multiple exposure and language domain-specific instruction. The analysis suggests that future research is needed in this important and growing area. These findings have implications for teachers and teacher educators and their practice in contemporary classrooms.