Archive

Recent Newsletter Articles

Stanford History Education Group

This comprehensive website has multiple lesson plans and assessments that cover a wide range of social studies topics, including U.S. History. The "Reading Like a Historian" curriculum engages students in historical inquiry, while the "Beyond the Bubble" history assessments measure students' historical thinking skills. The "Civic Online Reasoning" activities assess students’ ability to critically evaluate online content. Read More

In Their Own Words: Reading and Understanding Through Paraphrasing

Effective paraphrasing builds students' reading and writing skills and boosts comprehension of complex texts. Summarized here are materials and techniques for teaching paraphrasing in various ABE contexts, including addressing paraphrasing for the GED 2014 Extended Response. Read More

Grammar Bytes

A great resource for use with pre-GED, GED, diploma, college-prep learners and advanced ELLs. It can be used in the classroom with groups, during individual sessions with volunteers, or to help students build grammar skills at home or in an open lab. Read More

Text Structures

Each printable text structure activity provides six short passages and a worksheet for identifying each passage’s text structure (chronological, compare and contrast, cause and effect, sequence, problem and solution) and completing a related graphic organizer. Read More

Newsela – Multilevel

This website provides several “levels” of the same newspaper articles on a wide variety of topics, along with accompanying online quizzes, that students can read and take. Read More

ThoughtCo: Writing Skills

This website contains articles on English writing skills for a variety of purposes, including essays, formal and informal letter writing, resumes, business documents, that include examples and instructions. The articles can be printed for use in the classroom. Read More

Sounds of English

Sounds of English is a collaboration by Holly Gray and Sharon Widmayer that they started to help their ESL students develop their pronunciation and speaking skills. The site has been expanded to include information about their past research and presentations, lessons and activities for ESL teachers, and more. Read More

Pronunciation Pull-Out Kit

The Pronunciation Kit provides activity instructions for a wide variety of activities that focus on helping learners improve their pronunciation of English suprasegmentals (intonation, rhythm, stress, etc.). The activities in this kit can be used with low-beginning to advanced level English language learners. Read More

News in Levels: World News for Students of English

This website has articles collected from around the world available in three different levels. Each level has highlighted vocabulary words and a listening track so that readers can hear a native English speaker reading the article. Read More

Goal-Setting Lesson Plans

The San Diego Continuing Education Program has created PDFs of a three-part goal-setting lesson for adult ESL students. The lessons and materials are appropriate for high-beginning to advanced level learners. Read More