I’ve started a somewhat regular feature where I share a few posts and resources from around the Web related to ESL/EFL or to language in general that have caught my attention:
New Guide To Help States Commonly Define English-Learners is from the Learning The Language blog at Education Week.
Second Language Acquisition is a blog post worth reading by Nicholas Meier.
Cutting to the Common Core: Making Vocabulary Number One is by Kate Kinsella and appears in Language Magazine.
How Early a Second Language? Misconceptions about age and second language acquisition appears in Psychology Today.
Sound Gecko looks like a potentially useful tool — it lets you listen to the text on any website, and is read by a computer generated voice. The free account has some limitations, but seems relatively generous. I’m adding it to The Best Listening Sites For English Language Learners.
The Bilingual Brain is a pretty interesting piece from Brain Facts (including images of brain scans). I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.
Vidtionary is a fascinating online dictionary that uses mostly short and unique video clips from Vimeo to define English words. I learned about it from the Center For Applied Second Language Studies. The number of words they define now is relatively small. However, if and when they increase the number substantially, I’m sure I’ll add it to a “The Best…” list.
Thanks for the reference to my blog!
I think that implementing technology is a great way to help ESL students adapt to the classroom environment. For example, I love the idea of using twitter in the classroom. It really connects with the students on a personal level and makes them more comfortable in their classroom environment. I had a professor in college, in a class of about 300, have students tweet him questions that they have, and he would check his twitter a few times during class so that students who were shy did not have to speak out. I thought that was awesome, and really fascinated me. I always thought that this would be really beneficial to do in a younger student classroom because it could really help that kind of student. Of course, being on their phone could pose a number of serious issues.