ESL Resources
Academic Language
3 Strategies for Teaching ELLs Academic Language
This article provides three concrete strategies for supporting learners in understanding and remembering new academic vocabulary.
8 Strategies for Teaching Academic Language
This Edutopia article begins with a definition of academic language, offers some suggestions for where teachers should start with teaching, and provides eight specific strategies for academic language instruction.
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.
ACES Resource Library: Critical Thinking
The Critical Thinking page from the ACES resource library contains a wide variety of resources to support teachers looking to incorporate the Transitions Integration Framework (TIF) skills into their classroom instruction.
Choosing Complex Text
This video from ReadWriteThink features a first-grade teacher talking through the steps that she uses to select a complex text for her class. The strategies that are described are easily adapted to adult EL classrooms.
Creating Questions to Engage Critically with Texts
The strategy described in this article provides tools to create questions that help students engage critically with central texts and examine them for issues of power and social inequity. The activities suggested here also encourage readers to bring their knowledge and experiences to the reading of a text.
Meeting the Needs of Today’s English Language Learner
In this interactive online module, ABE practitioners explore the need for more rigorous academic instruction in language and literacy skills. The authors highlight specific elements that research has shown to be critical for adult English language learners’ full access to academic and work opportunities.
Once Upon a Picture: The Thinking Collection
A collection of images, photo and illustrations, with prompts to inspire learners to write or speak using critical thinking skills about the image.
PowerUp: What Works – English Language Arts Teaching Strategies
This website was built for teachers with a variety of learner levels in their K-12 classes and offers resources, strategies, and practical tips to personalize instruction to meet the needs of struggling students. The teaching suggestions and instructional suggestions can easily be applied to adult ESL classrooms where English Language Arts CCRS are being applied. This page provides information on topics such as teaching context clues, self-questioning, visualizing, and semantic mapping.
Talking Politics: Valuing Different Perspectives
This video from Edutopia demonstrates how high school students learn how to share and listen to opposing beliefs with empathy in the classroom.
Teaching with Current Events in Your Classroom
The Current Events Teacher Checklist from Facing History and Ourselves provides a step-by-step guide for teachers looking to incorporate reading and discussion about current events into their classroom. This website also offers a variety of accompanying activity suggestions and a moderated list of online news sources. Appropriate for intermediate level ESL and up.
Text Analysis Tools
ATOS for Text is used to calculate the readability level for shorter text passages such as magazine and newspaper articles, test items, and other classroom materials. Results that you will receive from this analysis include: ATOS Level, Word Count, Average Word Length, and Average Sentence Length.
The Academic Word Finder from Achieve the Core (found in the Reading library) is a text analysis tool that pulls the most useful academic vocabulary words from a given text that is copied and pasted onto the homepage.
Visible Thinking
Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. This website provides a convenient way to learn about Visible Thinking as well as thorough descriptions of the ideals, routines and activities that were developed from research in K-12 schools.
What does text complexity mean for English learners and language minority students?
In this paper, the authors demonstrate how English learners can be provided with strategies for accessing complex texts, such as closely examining one sentence at a time, and argue that instruction must go beyond vocabulary and should begin with an examination of our beliefs about language, literacy and learning.