Group items tagged

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

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.

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. 

On line book...you can download this, too I think. The title tells you what's in this book. It covers the theories of some of the big thinkers of the 20th century, and then takes theory to practice. It seems to be well written and the whole book is only about 50 pages.

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.

This is a pretty amazing graphic! It's so big I don't know how to print it out or even show it all at once, but very worth having! I discovered this through Larry Ferlazzo's blog.

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

Article about Competency-Based learning...not for ELLs, but worth looking at to see how schools are using this approach. This is high school in New Hampshire

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

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.

"This I Believe" is site I learned about from one of my grad students at Hamline. She uses it a source for writing, but in this particular case, she was integrating in some prosodics, so versatile. You might want to check it out...not especially created for ELLs, but can work for older learners who are not beginner.

With Common Core coming, it's worrisome to think about how ELLs will fare in this push towards standardization. Albuquerque (my old stomping grounds) is participating in this study supported by a number of groups. It might be useful to follow thiis over the next year...

This website provides MANY tutorials for teachers to learn about technology. A great resource to add to our Diigo group.

An interesting website about technology and education...this one seems to focus quite a bit on mobile devises. I discovered it through Nik Peachy's Scoop.It site. In particular, I was looking at a rubric for evaluating educational apps. There are SO many of them, but how good are they?

This is not too surprising, but it's worrisome. You'll see that ELLs who have only been here 1 year are included in the results, but also those who have been here longer. It just emphasizes how challenging it is to write in these timed test situations. There is also a technology component as students used word-processing programs to do the writing. A much longer article about the NAEP results was also in this edition of Ed Week, but I don't have an actual paid subscription, so I couldn't access/share that.