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California's credentialing board plans to expedite new rules governing intern teachers-those who came into the profession on alternative routes-in what will likely require them to take more upfront training on how to teach English-language learners.

116 pages on ELLs in city schools..."The Council of the Great City Schools conducted a comprehensive survey of its 65 district members about the English Language Learners that were enrolled and the instructional services provided to them The survey collected information on (1) district demographics and languages spoken, (2) instructional staff, (3) achievement data, and (4) financial information . The findings from this survey make up the bulk of this report. In addition, the report drew on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) and from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Nice article about foreign language instruction and ESL at this New York high school

Really nice infographic about the hardest languages to learn for English speakers.

Teflpedia is an award-winning wiki dedicated to everything associated with teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) or second language (TESL). Our objective is to become a major user-generated resource for English teachers from all over the world. We opened our doors on 27th May 2008 and we've been growing ever since. [This looks very interesting...and I'm already a big fan of wikis.]

I love the idea of this. Looking forward to checking it out.

Wow, what an awesome resource! Can't wait to use it!

"How to pronounce foreign languages Even if you can't master a native accent, the key is to be clear and comprehensible. Anne Merritt offers five top tips. "

Interesting article discussing the challenges of learning another language on line, and why it's more challenging than regular classes. These are things we know, but still important that in the push for e-learning, others see the limitations and barriers to this kind of delivery system.

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) academic is uniquely placed at the interface of theory informed practice and practice informed theory in English Language Teaching (ELT).

More about Common Core and how that will affect ELLs.  This article has several links...a video geared towards NNS parents (in Spanish), a video of the recent panel discussion on ELLs "rights to rigorous academic programs and content", and a link into the website to keep up with the lastest additions. 

Fantastic video with audio examples of some phonetically complex languages!

It's a great short visual representation....

"Ideas for English Language Learners | Labeling Photos, Sequencing Passages and More" - from the New York Times Learning Network Blog as posted by Larry Ferlazzo

I discovered this site that has tons of visuals to use for teaching ELLs (or foreign language)...some are multi-frame images which would be great for activities and assessment. Take look if you have a chance.

Very interesting article with active links, even recordings of endangered languages. From National Geographic.

Tuesday, Feb 21st is United National International Mother Language Day. I included the link to the site. There will probably be some interesting links/materials here. Worth checking out.

this is really wild! Gloves for hearing impaired people that "speak" the signs! Not TESL related, but so interesting, I thought I'd pass it on. There are a couple of demo You Tube videos included.

A panel of experts debate the implications of using smart drugs to help learn a language at a Guardian and British Academy debate

Nice article supporting dual-language and bilingual programs in the Southwest (mostly New Mexico, where I used to live).  This is from the public broadcasting station in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but still a mainstream publication. 

You may already have heard about this huge project from Google - the Ngram Viewer - an online tool for analyzing the history of language and culture, but there are some improvements.  The corpus is mind-boggling lare - 20 million books, and not just in English.  Plus the words have been tagged with their parts of speech.  There are some other functions that let you narrow in on particular groups of words...it seems to have some concordancer functions.  Well, you can read this article to learn more.

The push of Common Core is strong...and Illinois is a state that has adopted the Common Core standards. This will have an impact of ESL instruction, so we all need to stay on top of this.