Karenne Sylvester relates an excellent, and brief example of teaching idiom in Business English Idioms – The ball’s in your court appearing at How-to-learn-English. She even manages to include variants for auditory, visual, physical (kinesthetic) learners. Not content with this, she includes an “encore” with this post, The Business of Twitter – an English for Special Purposes Lesson residing at Kalinago English where her business students discussed business plans for twitter to develop their language skills. Brilliant!

Mathew Needleman shares some home-truths about making movies in How to Get Started Making Class Movies delivered at Creating Lifelong Learners.  It can be tedious getting to the final product. After seeing some of Mathew’s students’ work, you’d probably agree it’s worth it. The bad news? Another of Mathew’s home-truths, making movies is like playing Carnegie Hall, you need to practice. Not content with cinematic creativity, Mathew Needleman deconstructs and reconstructs Comprehension Strategies Posters V.3 on Creating Lifelong Learners, taking boring old clip-art and making it pop visually (and make more sense). Even if you aren’t stuck with Open Court for reading, these are great.

Drew analyzes How to Make a Good Impression in the IELTS Speaking Test ~ English Trainer carried on the English Trainer blog, with some really frank, and easy to follow advice that students may not be aware of, but need to know, to put their “best foot forward”.

Darren Elliott explains what he does in teacher development – Assessing Speaking contributed at teacher development blog. He does a great job of analyzing some of what he does (formal speeches) in contrast with the type of oral communication they are likely to encounter. He then asks for folks to share how they assess speaking, so do Darren a favor, and keep the conversation going by sharing what you do.

Edu-tainer relates how he introduced Role-playing Games in the classroom #1 on Edu-tainment Canada to teach two otherwise surly Korean teenagers English. He definitely wins the wise use of minimal materials prize for that hat-trick.

Myscha Theriault explores Spelling Activities: Twenty-Seven Ways to Practice in Style at Myscha Theriault in a post that will help you take spelling activities from the boring, “write the word 10 times” to something meaningful and engaging.

Ann S. Michaelsen creates a full unit on Teaching Hamlet putting in an appearance at Teaching English using web 2.0. It looks short and sweet, but it’s packed with meaty details in the links. Take a bite!

Larry Ferlazzo takes a look at chatbots, online applications using artificial intelligence that students can use to practice conversational English with. He analyzes and lists the best of them at The Best Online “Chatbots” For Practicing English | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… shared at Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…. The skivvy? Most are only good for fun and not suitable for replacing human-to-human conversational practice, except the last one. Nice job making sure folks read the whole article Larry!

In a post aimed at EFL students, One Language provides suggestions for Literary Choices for Students of English as a Second Language published at the Learn English blog. The article has a nice helpful and encouraging tone as it leads student through some of the entry-level choices to English literature.

AtlTeacher relates a project from Mr. Mayo (a recent “Totally Wired Teacher” winner) in Performance Assessment: Creating Films shared at Awesome Resources for Curious Teachers. The project had a small group of students in an after school group, creating stop-motion films to show what they had learned.

Seth Dickens shows how to connect classes in difference countries by pairing students up with Skype Calls for e-Twinning in L2 showing at DigitaLang. The post does a good job going through the overall setup and preperation. Another helpful part was the analysis of both what went well, and what he would have done differently.

Nik Peachey describes an activity for improving English pronounciation in Poems for Pronunciation putting an appearance in at Nik’s Daily English Activities. This is Nik’s blog aimed at EFL/ESL students. He goes through the steps for getting a poem, and recording it to practice pronounciation complete with screenshots (helpful for students and teachers alike). The activity has potential for oral fluency practice with middle grade ELD students. Hat tip Nik!

Michelle Klepper sees an application for a white elephant gift of 20 Questions for both struggling readers, and language learners in 20 Questions. What’s really nice is that she provides some activity plans for how to implement this tool to maximize the learning. Not content with that gem, she then outlines how she had students create Amazon Book Review 1st Post as part of doing book reviews. I like how she focuses not just on the thinking, but the actual steps and how long it took. And the final entry in Michelle’s triology chronicles implementing Language Arts Stations in an eighth grade class with a large number of ELLs and SPED (special education) students. Once again, very thorough in describing the setup, the implementation, and what worked, or didn’t. All of her posts appear at Ellclassroom.

There is thinking outside the box about how to teach English, then there is David Deubelbeiss’ brilliant, but not to be taken literally, The 7 Sensational Sins of Great English Language Teachers appearing at EFL Classroom 2.0 – Teacher Talk. Resist not the temptation to sin, and be a better teacher for it.

Mary Ann Zehr recounts how Seattle Plans Overhaul of ELL Programs–With Stimulus Funds reported at Learning the Language. This is a really interesting use of stimulus funds, and is news worth learning more about. Keep sharing Mary Ann!

Deven Black asks, “What were they thinking?” in Vice Versa showing at Education On The Plate about the scary and foolish things that can happen when Special Education meets ESL students. I used the post as a springboard for my own experience with ESL students not getting special education services when they probably should in Stupid ESL and Special Ed Tricks.

BUT, there is still time to add your submissions to the next edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival is coming up on May 31st, so don’t delay, get those submissions now before you miss your chance!

We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

Photo Credit: Dead End Black and White on flickr.

We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

All the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival can be found here.

When she arrived from Ecuador two years ago, Juanita, who barely spoke ten words of English, was placed in a special education class. Today she is a sixth grader who speaks English well but she is still in a special education class. Her teacher and I are wondering why.

Juanita is a real person, though that is not her real name. She is charming, funny, friendly and hard working. Aside from the remnants of her accent she seems like any number of other girls in our inner city middle school. Juanita smiles easily, tells a good joke and occasionally gets a little cranky. Her classwork and grades are not spectacular, but they are not terrible either. They are on the level of a middling general education student.

A month after he came to the US with his parents Robert was enrolled in kindergarten in a multi-ethnic, mixed income suburban district. This district has a policy that all students born outside the US must be placed in ELL classes, no exceptions.

Blanket policies are rarely a good idea, even if that policy would have helped Juanita. Here’s why.
Robert was born in South Africa to British parents. English is not only his native language, it is his only language. He speaks it with better enunciation and grammar than the school aid who insisted she had to enroll him in the ELL class.

I wanted him to share because I’ve had the opposite situation come up where students who are ELLs are not tested for Special Education services because we want to give them time, but what happens when you wait too long, which I shared in a comment at Education – Change.org: Arne Duncan to 8-Year-Old Woodrow Wilson: “No College for You”:

Clay, I’m usually with you on this, but I’m sorry, when my students end up coming out of second and third grade not reading, they’re screwed. We have a sixth grader like this, cannot read, and is working on decoding at age 12. He should have been identified LONG ago for services. He may go to college one day, but it’ll be a minor miracle if he does.

What’s all that other stuff about where I’m disagreeing with Clay? Well, actually when you get down to it, I wasn’t. Clay was discussing how Arne Duncan had said there was no chance for a kid who can’t read at 8 years old going to college, to which Clay pointed out President Woodrow Wilson (and a President of Princeton) did not learn to read until he was 12 years old. But, at the heart of Clay’s post (and the really good comments there) and what Deven says clearly is that you really can’t use the same yard stick to measure all kids and blanket policies that do NOT treat our kids as individuals will fail them in the end.

My proposal would be that you use what data you have (which will include both summative testing, and observation) to help these kids, but ask questions, and try to get quality data (not like testing a student new to the country in English as happened to Juanita). I have found EL students muddling along through school at the two lowest proficiency levels (we have five in California with the top two being passing) on state testing. Sometimes the adults in charge take a look at the kid and just say, well that’s because he is learning English, just give him time. While it is true that not all kids learn at the same speed, sometimes that is a sign that more is needed and it doesn’t take much to figure out if you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

Sitting on our school’s student study team (the team tasked with looking at individual students who are struggling), the test scores can tell us a bit, but it’s the questions we ask each other about the individual child that tell us more. If an ELL child has low test scores, the next thing to look at is to look at their CELDT scores (a test of English acquisition that all California students take to see how they are progressing). If they start out behind on the standards test, they could be progressing in knowledge, but it won’t show because they are still behind grade level. The CELDT tells us some more about how they are doing on things like listening and speaking in English. The test stays the same for a 2-3 years, so a flatline score is a sign that something is not going right. Ask yourself, are they getting English Language services that are addressing their specific deficit, or are they learning something they have already mastered.

But, it’s the subtle questions that can really point to a problem. California’s default model for ELLs is to put them in a Sheltered English program. Parents are asked once a year what how they would like their children to be educated, in a bilingual or sheltered program. Most opt for sheltered. This means that we are not doing assessment in the child’s home language if they’ve been in the country for more than a year or so. One of the most important questions to ask a parent when we have a student who is not progressing both in academic testing and in English acquisition is  are they maintaining or losing their knowledge of their home language. If they aren’t learning English, and they are losing their home language, they are, overall, losing language. This is not a good thing. Do the kids have signs of attention problems like a wandering focus? Do they have an inability to retain information after it is taught to them? Is this true in BOTH English and their home language? If you are answering yes to these questions, they could have a processing disorder, and should be tested. If they are in primary, and they have few home language skills along with below age-level English, that can be a sign of a language disorder (like PDD-NOS or Austism Spectrum Disorder). ASD is really hard to spot in Language Learners, but it happens.

I think all these cases teach us the danger of making assumptions where we either ignore data, over-rely on data, or look at the wrong data, instead of looking at the total picture, and the total child.

We are looking for posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work. We know there are lots of great examples out there, so don’t hide your light under the bushel!

Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

All the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival can be found here.

What are we looking for? Posts related to the teaching or learning of English, including examples of student work, are welcome.

Need an example? Check out the latest edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival, which was hosted by Nik Peachey.

All the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival can be found here.