NEIU TESL

Newest entry from Scott Thornbury's An A-Z of ELT blog...P is for Phoneme. Very interesting points here...this might/will challenge your thinking.

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. 

Let me just say that the there is a massive amount of information here on a wide range of subjects. You could easily spend hours on this site and barely scratch the surface. Of course the quality is variable, but I found quite a few excellent things in a short time, so very worth saving this link!

always nice to see something about Diigo...this is a SlideShare presentation with 95 slides!  I only looked through a few of them, but plan to take a better look later.  If you check this out before me, please post your reactions.

I have been reading Larry Ferlazzo's revies of his best posts over the years and looking over some of the ones that are still active. This one, Culture Crossing, seems to have some great inf about cultural differences (and also exploring our own cultures). A lot of potential here, I think

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

I checked out all 5 of the tools presented in this article, and I think all have potential...and they are all a little bit different. For some, you create a prompt; for others, you choose between many prompts; one of them has a prompt of the day (by maybe an archive too). Probably you'd pick out one or two that appeal to you most depending on the age/proficiency of your students. Certainly these sites are not necessarily for ELLs, but I can't see why you couldn't use the sites for this population.

I had forgotten about this site, but today someone posted it on one of the Diigo groups I belong to. If you haven't seen Omniglot before, I think you'll really enjoy it.

Link to a bibliographic resource on Vocabulary Acquisition Research...quite current - up to June 2012

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

Interesting article about culture and translation (specifically the new Chinese leader and an interpreter's translation of an apology...or was it?)

Well, this isn't really an ESL issue, but it's very interesting and could be useful in a TESL or Linguistics class...or just for anyone interested in word origins.  

This is a very nice interview and short article about why slang is necessary. The sound file is only 5 minutes, so some potential here to use with students.

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.

Great list of free tech sites for ESL teachers.

Well, I think there's potential with advanced level ELLs here, but also anyone who is writing a research paper (and doesn't enjoy working with APA style...or MLA or Chicago Style...and really, who does?). Take a look and see if it's something that would work for you or your students.

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.

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. 

this looks like a very fascinating stie...there will be a separate video for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Each video includes the etymology of words that begin with the particular letter.  It's very cleverly done and I can see some potential.  Worth taking a look.

This is a very clever writing tool - templates for particular genres...each template has 6 parts - the 6 sides of a cube. There is also a planning sheet available. Students can take the planning and turn it into an actual essay. Useful for gr 3-8, but also lower levels of older ELLs.