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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, for more than eleven years and welcomed the NEA as a project partner in 2014. Recently updated, 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 related to the Common Core and ELLs, including Diane Staehr Fenner’s Common Core blog. 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.  To address challenges presented by remote learning, Colorín Colorado has developed a resource for teaching ELL students online. 
  • Understanding Language
    This website from the Stanford Graduate School of Education provides resources, research and professional learning opportunities such as webinars and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with a focus on supporting ELLs to meet the expectations of the Common Core. There is a particular emphasis on supporting ELLs in content area classrooms. So far the focus has been on helping ELLs succeed in addressing the Common Core English Language Arts, Mathematics and Next Generation Science standards.
  • Collaboration and Co-Teaching: Strategies for English Learners
    This webpage by Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld and Dr. Maria Dove contains a wide array of their resources to support teachers of ELLs in the Integrated ENL classrooms required under the recent changes in CR Part 154, where a co-teaching model is frequently needed. They offer seven models of co-teaching, explanations, samples, strategies and useful tools for the collaborative planning of instruction. 
  • AFT Immigration Resources
    The AFT offers many resources on education and how to protect our students.

Useful articles and publications

For an exhaustive list of research and reports on all aspects of teaching and assessing ELLs, view the compilation at Colorín Colorado.

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 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 an 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
  • 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.
  • Make Beliefs Comix
    Use this site to create comic strips. Choose from a diverse cast of characters. Select objects, scenes and emotions. Use talk balloons and thought balloons. Write in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Latin.
  • LibriVox
    LibraVox 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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