Resources

View the slides from Collective Joy: Leveraging Students’ Collectivist Mindset as a Classroom Asset, presented by Erin Cary and Cydnee Sanders at the 2025 Minnesota English Learner Education (MELEd) Conference. This session invites educators to shift from deficit-based thinking to an asset-based approach that recognizes the collectivist strengths many multilingual adult learners bring to the classroom. The resource includes practical strategies—such as simple, community-building routines—and reflective prompts to help educators create classroom environments where connection, identity, and joy are central to adult ESL and ABE instruction.

This PowerPoint shares the importance of teaching academic writing in the 21st century; reports on a 2014-2015 survey of adult ESL writing instruction; briefly describes ten approaches that are better aligned with academic writing skill development; and concludes with references for exploration by ABE/ESL writing teachers.

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.

This PowerPoint outlines goal-setting projects and their results in beginning level adult ESL classrooms. Images of handouts and descriptions of activities are provided.