BiljaST / Pixabay

 

Six years ago I began this 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.

You might also be interested in THE BEST RESOURCES, ARTICLES & BLOG POSTS FOR TEACHERS OF ELLS IN 2020.

Also, check out A Collection Of My Best Resources On Teaching English Language Learners.

In addition, look for our new book on teaching ELLs, which was published in the Spring of 2018 and learn about our next book.

Here are this week’s choices:

Digital Einstein lets you talk to digital version of Albert Einstein. I’m adding it to The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English.

How to Bring Traditional Games to World Language Classes is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Ideas For Using Games In The ESL/EFL/ELL Classroom.

Heritage Language Development (Krashen, Tse, & McQuillan, 1998) – Free Book is from The Backseat Linguist.

Tower Of Babble: Nonnative Speakers Navigate The World Of ‘Good’ And ‘Bad’ English is from NPR.

Tutor Helps Students Hit Hard By Pandemic, Language Barriers is from NPR.

Language learning startup Toucan raises $4.5M is from TechCrunch.

Celebrating Multilingual Learner Identity through Personal Narrative Instruction is from Language Magazine.

 

A colleague at our school who teaches math to Newcomers is very excited about Desmos.  Here’s what Dan Meyer, Dean of Research at Desmos, told me after I asked him for how other teachers have been using it with ELLs:

During this last awful year, we’ve been really happy to support educators outside of our original community of math teachers. With teachers of multilingual students, we see them taking advantage of student components like photo upload, sketch, and card sort, which allow students to express their thinking even while they’re developing their ability to describe it in writing. We also see teachers using some of our advanced features in some really novel ways. Like Jenna Davis here (who might be a useful source for you) who uses our “initialText” setting to add sentence frames to text input components, giving students a useful scaffold for their thinking.

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Teaching Common Core Math To English Language Learners.

 

The On The Same Page blog talks about On The Stop, an intriguing tool for using improv in class. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Using Improvisation In The ESL/EFL/ELL Classroom.

Here are two videos that can be shown to ELLs and then they can be asked to talk and write about what they saw:

This next video gives an accurate idea on some of the challenges facing ELLs trying to learn the language: