Archive
Recent Newsletter Articles
Academic Language and ELLs: What Teachers Need to Know
This article helps educators understand the role that academic language plays in their classrooms and in ELL student success. The article also includes information on social vs. academic language, as well as numerous examples of the different kinds of academic language needed for all students to fully participate in classroom activities and assignments. Read More
A Strategy of Giving Corrective Feedback to ELLs
This article explains how using sentence frames and explicit feedback can provide the right balance of structure and scaffolding for English language learners. Read More
8 Strategies for Building Relationships with ELLs in Any Learning Environment
Learn how educators can build authentic relationships with ELLs in virtual and hybrid settings, as well as how they can connect students' experiences to meaningful instruction. This article was written for a K-12 audience, but ABE teachers will find the recommendations to be helpful and easily implemented with adult learners. Read More
Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
This book offers educators tools to increase democratic participation in the classroom and to think about education as a practice of freedom. From the back cover: "Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for the author, the teacher's most important goal." Read More
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Brazilian educational activist Paulo Freire originally published the seminal book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. This book is essential reading for any educator interested in adult literacy and equity. Freire explains how traditional schooling perpetuates colonization and domination over oppressed classes of people and the way to liberation is through literacy and evoking critical consciousness in education. Read More
Secondary Traumatic Stress and Self-Care Packet
Educators, counselors, and other support staff who work with students exposed to trauma are at risk of being indirectly traumatized as a result of hearing about their students’ experiences and witnessing the negative effects. In the first section of this packet, learn about secondary traumatic stress and related conditions; in the second section, use the tools and strategies provided to help you create individual and schoolwide plans to promote staff self-care and resilience. Read More
Trauma and Learning: Impacts and Strategies for Adult Classroom Success
Exposure to potentially traumatic events, which can have a significant impact on brain mechanisms for language learning, is high in adult ELL classrooms. This article outlines strategies that target attention and memory networks which may make it easier for adults to learn. Read More
Race, Identity, and English Language Teaching
A Joint TESOL Quarterly and TESOL Journal Publication This is an online database of articles on race and teaching curated by editors from TESOL Journal and TESOL Quarterly, to support TESOL’s statement against racial injustice and inequality. Read More
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Author Peggy McIntosh explains, "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." Proceeding from her studies on male privilege, her list outlining the "daily effects of white privilege" is a starting point to help people understand how this dynamic shows up in our lives regardless of intent and without our conscious participation - so that we can begin creating a more equitable society. Read More
Worth the Risk: Towards Decentering Whiteness in English Language Teaching
In this article the author reveals how English Language Teaching (ELT) centers whiteness and its negative impact on teachers and students of color. The author also provides suggestions for how ELT educators can de-center whiteness in the ELT field. Read More