Teachers who work with English as a Second Language learners will find ESL/ESOL/ELL/EFL reading/writing skill-building children's books, stories, activities, ideas, strategies to help PreK-3, 4-8, and 9-12 students learn to read.
Academic Language
This website from Jefferson County Schools in Tennesse offers academic vocabulary lists for grades K-12. In addition to lists of vocabulary for specific content areas, there are lots of games, with downloads for the game boards and content word cards.
This site by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) offers lots of information about how to help students build academic vocabulary. Although designed to promote instructional materials sold by ASCD, the site has information that any teacher could use to enhance vocabulary instruction.
Catherine Snow: Intervening to Increase General Academic Vocabulary
Catherine Snow's powerpoint, "Intervening to Increase General Academic Vocabulary." This PowerPoint was featured at the CREATE Conference in 2008. It includes information on the Word Generation program that was created in response to her research on explicit vocabulary teaching and academic content learning. Includes study information and description of how the Word Generation program works.
Catherine Snow: Word Generation
Catherine Snow's new website provides information and resources for educators who would like to learn more about Word Generation and how it is implemented. Includes links to comprehensive academic word list that students need to master to comprehend academic content.
ESL/Bilingual Resource Guide for Mainstream Teachers
For a quick guide to working with ELL students, check out this resource from the Portland Public Schools (OR). You'll find useful, practical information in an accessible format that you'll return to again and again, including an excellent language acquisition chart and a glossary of ELL terms.
Learning the Language is a blog sponsored by Education Week and written by Mary Ann Zehr. The blog tackles difficult policy questions surrounding English-language learning, explores learning innovations, and shares stories about different cultural groups.
Literacy Matters: Vocabulary Instruction
Many links to resources focusing on developing vocabulary in various content areas.
TeacherVision: Language Arts Graphic Organizers
These graphic organizers can be used to prepare for a five-paragraph essay, organize sentences in a paragraph, map concepts and events, compare topics with a Venn Diagram, organize notes for a presentation, create a double-entry journal, and much more.
Congratulations — your material has been a tremendous help to develop reading and writing abilities for kids with cognitive disabilities.
~ Monica H.
