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Resources supporting effective instruction for ELLs

Helpful websites

  • Colorín Colorado
    Colorín Colorado is a free website for educators and families of English language learners based at WETA in Washington, DC. Colorín Colorado has collaborated closely with its founding partner, the American Federation of Teachers, since 2003. Colorín Colorado is the leading ELL website nationwide, offering practical, research-based classroom resources for grades PreK-12, such as strategy articles, tip sheets, toolkits, videos, webinars, multicultural booklists for students, professional books and reports, updates from the field, and multilingual materials to support ELL parent outreach.  Colorín Colorado also has an extensive library of videos and materials. The materials on the site have been designed to be shared and used by classroom teachers and content-area teachers, as well as ESOL specialists and bilingual teachers. Sign up for their email newsletters.   
  • AFT Immigration Resources
    The AFT offers many resources on education and how to protect our students.

Useful articles and publications

Professional organizations

  • Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International
    This international organization is a professional body serving the world’s teachers of English to speakers of other languages. While some of its resources are reserved for members, it does include some freely available also.
  • New York State TESOL
    The New York State branch of TESOL supports ELL teachers in New York State with professional learning in classroom practices, research, program and curriculum development, funding and legislative interests.
  • National Association for Bilingual Education
    NABE's mission is to advocate for bilingual and English Language Learners and their families and to cultivate a multilingual multicultural society by supporting and promoting policy, programs, pedagogy, research and professional development that yield academic success, value native language, lead to English proficiency, and respect cultural and linguistic diversity.
  • NYSABE (NYS Association for Bilingual Education)
    NYSABE is a multilingual and multicultural association fostering the awareness and appreciation of bilingualism and biculturalism as an integral part of cultural pluralism in our society and especially in New York State. The organization provides resources and research in addition to advocating for quality bilingual programs.

Additional helpful instructional resources

  • Bilingual Glossaries
    Bilingual glossaries are an essential and expected test accommodation for English Language Learners in the State of New York. This website presents glossaries for at least the top 10 state languages at the state level, but it is updated with new languages based on requests from schools and updates in state data.
  • ReadWorks 
    Free content and tools including texts and accompanying activities for ELLs
  • Support Ed provides free tools to support teaching in providing formative assessment, social emotional learning and culturally responsive instruction for multilingual learners
  • Online Writing Lab, Purdue University
    Purdue's Online Writing Lab maintains a repository of resources for both ELL teachers and for ELL students. As this is a college site it will be of greatest assistance to high school teachers of ELLs in helping students become college-ready. Topics include understanding writing assignments, plagiarism and ESL writers, audience consideration for ESL writers and numerous grammar-focused resources.
  • LibriVox
    LibriVox makes books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the Internet. It is noncommercial, nonprofit and ad-free. The catalogue is organized by author, title, genre/subject and language. Offerings include over a thousand non-English works in languages ranging from a variety of western European languages to Belarusian, Bengali, Cantonese Chinese, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Yiddish.

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