May 01 2008
The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current ELL/ESL/EFL News & Research
In addition to keeping-up with the latest overall education news, I’m obviously particularly interested in the latest research and policy issues related to teaching English Language Learners.
I thought readers might find it helpful to see what I’ve found to be the best free sources of this kind of information, so I’ve developed yet another “The Best…” list.
These sites are different from the ones I shared in The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers. Those sites share immediately practical ideas and materials that can be used in the classroom — today.
The sites on this list are more related to on-going research and policy issues connected to English Language Learners.
Here they are, not necesarily in order of preference:
There are two blogs I like that provide regular updates on ELL research and news. One is Learning The Language by Mary Ann Zehr at Edweek. The other is ELL Advocates from The Institute For Language and Education Policy. James Crawford and Stephen Krashen are the primary writers there.
OELA Newsline from the Office Of English Acquisition, U.S. Department of Education, offers a good weekly summary of articles and research, or you can subscribe by RSS Feed Reader.
The Center For Applied Second Language Studies offers an excellent weekly e-bulletin called InterCom. It gives a customized summary of information related to specific areas of your interest.
TESOL Connections is a nice e-newsletter that’s sent out twice-a-month. However, you have to be a TESOL member in order to receive it. A “second-best” free TESOL resource that’s available to anyone is a blog called In The News, which provides reports on ESL/EFL around the world.
Colorin Colorado is a great resource site for teachers of English Language Learners. They’ve just revamped their Research and Reports section, and also have a new webcast on English Language Learners and Academic Language. You can also subscribe to a weekly update here.
The Center On Instruction has a ton of resources on research-based instructional practices in all subject areas.Because of its good materials on English Language Learners, I’m now adding it to this list.
Feel free to provide additional suggestions in the comments section of this post.
If you’ve found this list helpful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.
2 responses so far
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Hi Larry,
Here’s another site for this list:
http://esolworldnews.wordpress.com
It has news articles from all over the world on current events in ESL/EFL. It looks like it’s only been up for about a month, but so far, so good. I was a little leery when I saw that the guy doing the posts works for a publisher, but all I’ve seen is straight news stories. Check it out!
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The ESOL World News link has been moribund since December. Shame, as I only discovered it in April!
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