Advocacy Groups Call to Postpone In-Person Exam for ELL’s
A number of advocacy groups have called on President-elect Joe Biden’s education transition team to amend the requirements for the in-person WIDA Access exam for English Language Learners. The request comes due to the...
A Voice for English Teachers in Africa
America-jin desuka? Nai, Africa-jin desu.
Back in 2009, as I sat at a train station in Kobe, Japan, waiting for my train, a young boy aged about six traveling with his mother sat next to...
Stop Overlooking English Learners
Deborah J. Short outlines a plan to invest and engage in English Learner education
In the past six months, we have heard the cry “DEFUND” in varied contexts, often as a call for social justice,...
From Silence to Conversation: Breaking Down the Wall One Essential Shift at a Time
Dan: What is one of the most common barriers to facilitating the shift from silence to oracy for multilingual learners, and how can we work to overcome it?
Tonya: This shift is about changing habits,...
Making a Game Plan Work
Nowadays, anyone having anything to do with second language (SL) acquisition would likely agree that games support SL education. Plenty of research has proven that a relaxing atmosphere and released tension improve the effectiveness...
The UK Implements PRELIM – the Partnered Remote Language Improvement Project
Major English language organizations have partnered in the UK to improve language teaching standards in 20 countries, starting in the 2021. The British Council, English UK and IATEFL (the International Association of Teachers of...
One Word
When I stood in front of a room of adult refugees with a wide range of life experience who spoke five different languages, and then tried to teach them to speak English, I was...
Recognizing Multilingual Speech Patterns
More than 20% of children in the U.S. are bilingual, a number that continues to rise year over year (Kids Count Data Center, 2018). According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), there is a...
Study Shows Brain’s Innate Capacity for Reading
The human brain is predisposed to visualizing words, even before individuals acquire literacy, according to a team of researchers at Ohio State University.
Their paper, published in Scientific Reports, focuses on a region of the...
Five Million Assessments Reveal COVID Educational Slide
A new report based on 5.3 million assessments of student progress in grades 1-8 details the effects on learning associated with COVID-19 school disruptions. Released by Renaissance (a leader in pre-K–12 education technology) to...