Ten years ago I began this regular feature where I share a few posts and resources from around the Web related to ESL/EFL or to language in general that have caught my attention.

You might also be interested in all my Best lists on teaching ELLs.

Also, check out A Collection Of My Best Resources On Teaching English Language Learners.

In addition, look for our latest book on teaching ELLs, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox 2.0.

Here are this week’s choices:

ELL students could watch this video and then talk/write about what they saw:

My all-time favorite Super Bowl commercial.

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— Jen Jennings (@jenjennings.bsky.social) February 6, 2026 at 7:05 AM

The Dos & Don’ts of Error Correction When Teaching English is from Bridge. I’m adding it to The Best Resources On ESL/EFL/ELL Error Correction.

EAL adaptations: Lonely Planet Travel Writing is from ELT Planning.

AI experiments: IGCSE ESL speaking assessment bank is from ELT Planning.

Why Most C1 Song Lessons Fail — And What to Do Instead is from Song Activity Factory. I’m adding it to The Best Music Websites For Learning English.

The relationship between vocabulary learning strategies, reading comprehension, and motivation among secondary school EFL learners is a new study I’m adding to Best Posts On “Motivating” Students.

Conference Pet Peeves is by David Duebelbeiss.

Cambridge Online Day session – Creating an inclusive learning environment: Teacher tips and takeaways (Ben Goldstein) is from Lizzie Pinard.

“If the City Could Talk…” 3 Beautiful Ideas to Talk about City Life is from Blog de Cristina.

How One Rural District Used College Students to Keep English Learners in School is from Ed Week.

Mentors Can Prevent English Learners From Dropping Out. Here’s How is from Ed Week.

Vocaspeak provides over eighty free pronunciation lessons for English Language Learners.

No sign-up is required.

Each lesson focuses on one-or-two sounds. You can hear it first, and then record. It will assess you on your accuracy.

I’m adding it to The Most Useful Free Or VERY Low Cost AI Tools For Supporting English Language Learners.

You’ll want to check out this study, Cultural Relevance at Scale: The Effects of an Ethnic Studies Expansion on Academic Outcomes, that’s NOT behind a paywall.

You’ll also want to read Jen Jennings’ comment on it here:

If any other intervention produced outcomes of this size – GPA improvements of .24SD & reductions in course failure of .14SD – districts would be desperate to implement it.

Instead, because ethnic studies has been labeled as “woke,” efforts to scale have slowed.

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— Jen Jennings (@jenjennings.bsky.social) April 13, 2026 at 8:26 AM

I’m adding this info to The Best Posts On The Value Of Ethnic Studies Classes – Help Me Find More.

GDJ / Pixabay

I’m adding these two new resources to The Best Resources For Helping Teach About The 250th Anniversary Of The American Revolution:

“In Pursuit” has been a series of fairly boring lengthy essays, primarily about U.S. Presidents and their wives.  However, iCivics has managed to take the small kernels of usefulness from some of them and create something the teachers can use.  Check out their In Pursuit Video Series.

Ken Burns and YouTube have created a partnership and are creating videos and interactive lessons.  You can read about the program here and here, visit the YouTube Channel here, and go to Ken Burns’ site here.

September is Suicide Prevention Month.

You might be interested in The Best Resources Helping Educators Learn About Suicide & Warning Signs.

PEER TUTORING AND MENTORING

Students teaching their classmates or younger students is an activity that has been key to our teaching.

One way we’ve done this is in our English Language Learner classes where older students receive credit for working each day as peer tutors assisting new immigrants in their academic classes. Extensive research, and our own experience, documents how this kind of tutoring helps both the tutor and the person being tutored.

But peer tutoring doesn’t have to be that formalized. If students complete their work early in our class, we often give them a choice—they can read, do extra credit, or help another student who is still working on the assignment. Nine times out of ten, students will choose to work as a tutor, and we emphasize that if they want to be able to continue being a tutor, they can’t just hang out with their buddy—they need to help someone who needs it. We monitor as best we can while circulating throughout the room, and have found that, at most, a very occasional reminder might be needed.

Another version of peer tutoring is when an English Language Learner is in a class primarily composed of English-proficient students, a teacher might pair them with a classmate, sometimes referred to as a “buddy,” who might or might not speak the ELL student’s primary language. This combination, only done with the permission of both parties, can help everybody.

Yet another kind of peer tutoring is a variation of the Dialogue Journal idea. Traditionally, dialogue journals are used as back-and-forth conversations between students and teachers. In English Language Learner classes, they’re often used for student writing practice. Instead of the teacher explicitly correcting the student’s incorrect grammar or spelling, they “recast” their mistakes. For example, if an ELL student writes, “We go to San Francisco last week,” the teacher might write, “It sounds exciting that you went to San Francisco last week” in their reply. The idea of direct corrections might make students feel more intimidated by the prospect of writing.

The peer tutoring part of this comes into play when, instead of having the dialogue journals between ELL students and us, they are between them and another class of English-proficient students or more advanced ELLs. Then it’s the responsibility of those “sibling classes” to engage in dialogues and recasts with the ELL students. And, believe us, our ELL students tend to be much more motivated to write to an authentic audience of another student instead of us. And, once again, the students in the sibling class get grammar practice, too!

Of course, in all of these situations, we provide training and guidance to students about tutoring expectations, including the difference between giving the answers and guiding their “tutees” to finding them on their own with assistance, the importance of positive affirmation over harsh critique, and technology-assisted and non-tech assisted strategies for communicating across languages. Demonstrating good examples and bad examples are very effective forms of training. In one situation, Larry used the good example of saying “How can we do this better?” and the bad example of saying, “You did this wrong.” It worked well for my students, but remember what we discussed in Chapter One and use examples that work with the relationship you have with your students.

Peer mentoring, though somewhat similar to peer tutoring, is a different kettle of fish. In peer mentoring, older students are paired with younger ones to provide regular emotional support. For example, as mentioned earlier, Larry’s IB Theory of Knowledge classes would go to a different ninth-grade class once a week and walk around the school with them for ten minutes. Mentors received training on providing support, and each week asked their mentees about their highs and lows from the previous seven days (and was there anything they could have done to make their low a little better). In addition, they were given a focus question each time, like “What is your goal for the next month?” and “What is your biggest worry right now?”

We also encourage students to do a home-based version of this kind of tutoring/mentoring. We offer extra credit to students who sit with younger siblings or cousins and read story books to them. They just have to write down the name of the book or story they read, how long it took, and how their sibling/cousin reacted to them. As with practically everything we do, we first provide an example of how to read to a child.

TEACHING OTHERS

This “teaching others” strategy is different from the one-on-one or one-on-two peer tutoring and peer mentoring discussed in the previous section.

In this context, “teaching others” means organized activities where the entire class is, in some way or form, teaching everybody else.

In effect, everybody is a teacher.

This could take several forms.

One is the use of the well-known jigsaw technique. In this strategy, which education researcher John Hattie offers as one the most effective available to teachers, an individual student or a small group is tasked with teaching smaller parts of a bigger concept or story (different parts of a historical figure’s biography, separate sections of a larger article, certain elements of a scientific concept) to their classmates, either in small groups or to the entire class.

Another is structured peer review. Research has shown that peer review tends to be very effective for enhancing student learning.We’ve used it primarily in student writing, with classmates providing structured (and supportive!) feedback, and when practicing for presentations. Here, as in most of our class activities, we often provide a written guide and share in writing and verbally both helpful and not-so-helpful peer feedback.

And a third version is having individual students or small groups instruct the entire class. In this activity, usually done near the end of the school year, we let small student groups choose any topic within reason and they have to develop an instructional unit utilizing the primary teaching strategies we’ve used during the school year (inductive teaching [see Chapter 3: Differentiated Teaching], Read Alouds, games for reinforcement, etc.). Though they have to create a full unit, they usually just actually teach one lesson because of time constraints.

Most teachers are familiar with the “Gradual Release of Responsibility” model—I do, We do, You do. We think that, when logistically possible, the more educators can add a fourth step, “Teach It,” the better for everyone.

Federal legislation requires schools in the United States to offer lessons related to the U.S. Constitution on U.S. Constitution Day — September 17th of each year.

You might be interested in The Best Sites For Learning About The Constitution Of The United States.

Pexels / Pixabay

Google just announced that you can use its AI Gemin tool to create music.

This is different from its Flow Music tool, which I wrote about when they were calling it something else (see Google Just Created A New AI Tool That Is Perfect For Teachers Of ELL Newcomers).

I, like many others, have periodically had fun playing with Suno, the AI app for making songs.  It seems to me that Google’s new integration is likely to stomp on their business.

I think Google’s new feature might be helpful to ELL teachers who, like me, are not musically-inclined, but would like to create songs to help our students learn English.  It could also be used by learners themselves who want to create their own songs.

I asked Gemini to create a song teaching the differences between have, has and had for English Language Learners.  In seconds in came up with this:

Not great, but not bad for a few seconds of work.

Here are the lyrics:

🎵 “Has, Have, and Had” (The Grammar Song)

(Verse 1 – Present Tense: Have)

When we talk about right now,

For I, you, we, and they,

We use the word have

Every single day!

I have a book, you have a friend,

We have a goal, they have time to spend!

(Chorus)

Have, has, or had—which one do you choose?

Learn the right subject and you’ll never lose!

Present or past, now or long ago,

Here is how the grammar rules go!

(Verse 2 – Present Tense: Has)

When it’s he, she, or it,

Or a single person’s name,

Switch have to has—

It’s the present tense game!

He has a dog, she has a key,

It has bright colors for all to see!

(Verse 3 – Past Tense: Had)

Now look to the past,

Yesterday or last year,

For every single pronoun,

The rule is simple and clear!

Just use had for I, you, he, or they,

When action is finished and washed away!

Yesterday I had a hat,

She had a cold, they had a chat!

(Outro)

I have, you have, we have, they have!

He has, she has, it has!

Yesterday, last week, or years ago… we ALL had!

I’m adding this info to:

The Best Music Websites For Learning English

The Best Online Sites For Creating Music

THE BEST POSTS ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WITH ELLS

ADDENDUM: You are far more ambitious than I am, you can also look at this example of how an instructor used an AI tool as much part of a much more involved lesson.

Here’s today’s announcement from Google:

Google Translate’s live translate brings natural, near-real time audio translations to 70+ languages. Today, we’re introducing two updates to make translations even more seamless.

First, because more than a third of live translation sessions now last longer than five minutes, Android users can now keep live translations running in the background. This is perfect for longer sessions where you need to multitask or want to lock your phone screen. iOS support is coming soon.

Second, iOS users worldwide can now get live translations directly through their phone’s earpiece. (The feature is already available on Android.) When you don’t have headphones handy, just hold your phone to your ear. It’s great for catching announcements at noisy airports or following along on crowded tours.

I’m adding this info to THE BEST RESOURCES TO HELP ELL STUDENTS WITH SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION IN THE CLASSROOM.

Each week, I publish a post or two containing three or four particularly useful resources on classroom instruction, and you can see them all here.

You can also see all my “Best” lists on instructional strategies here.

Here are this week’s picks:

Our last sketchnote – and a massive thanks to the incredible Jen who created them all for us pic.twitter.com/l3nV0yee2c

— InnerDrive (@Inner_Drive) February 14, 2026

And here’s a brilliant sketchnote summary of the whole talk 👇 pic.twitter.com/QkJuPiEfea

— InnerDrive (@Inner_Drive) February 14, 2026

I’m adding these next two posts to The Best Posts & Articles About Providing Students With Choices:

Math Choice Boards are a carefully selected collection of math experiences that are differentiated and designed to support student engagement and agency. #iTeachMath

mathtransformations.com/resources/ma…

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— Ralph Pantozzi (@mathillustrated.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:20 AM

Choice Boards:
Allow teachers to choose the tasks, categories, amount assigned, & timeframe
Allow students to choose which tasks to do and why, who to work with, & how to express the learning

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— Ralph Pantozzi (@mathillustrated.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:20 AM

How to Really Prepare Students for State Tests is from Edutopia. I’m adding it to Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They’re Bad).

Who calls classical music boring? It’s straight-up rocket fuel.

pic.twitter.com/MDuXxWzGgP

— Kevin W. (@Brink_Thinker) February 15, 2026

Are We Teaching Too Much Phonics? is from Timothy Shanahan.

Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay

The anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took place on 9/11 is coming-up.

You might be interested in The Best Sites To Help Teach About 9/11.

geralt / Pixabay

It’s been an awful eighteen months for many – particularly for people directly affected by the Trump administration’s immigration’s policies (see The Best Resources To Support Schools, Teachers, Students & Families In The Face Of Trump’s Deportation Threats).

Though I suspect it’s obvious to most educators, I thought it would be useful to create a list sharing resources documenting some of the direct negative impacts those policies are having on students.  You can see ideas on how to support them in the face of these attacks at the other “Best” list I just mentioned.

Those same policies are resulting in reduced student enrollment and increased absences, including in ELL classes ( I offer some ideas on how schools should handle this impact at What Should Schools Do As The Numbers Of ELL Newcomers Decrease?).  I thought it would also be useful to bring together some related informational resources on that, too:

STUDENT TRAUMA

To No One’s Surprise, Research Finds That ICE Raids ‘Are Having Disruptive Effects On Students’

U.S. immigration policy: Mental health impacts of increased detentions and deportations is from the American Psychological Association.

As Immigration Raids Stoke Anxiety, What Are the Implications for How Children Learn? is from Ed Surge.

Effects of Pervasive Immigration Enforcement on Children’s Health is from The New England Journal Of Medicine.

Potential Impacts of Mass Detention and Deportation Efforts on the Health and Well-Being of Immigrant Families is from KFF.

Trump ICE policies create student trauma — but schools can help, researchers say is from K-12 Dive.

Parental stress, raids, and isolation: How immigration enforcement traumatizes even the youngest children is from MindShift.

How Strict Immigration Enforcement Harms Schoolchildren is from Stanford.

Immigration Concerns Disrupted Families’ Essential Activities and Caused Children Emotional Distress in 2025 is from The Urban Institute.

How immigration enforcement is harming US schools and students is from Brookings.

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Harming Young Children and Their Caregivers is from The 74.

Immigration enforcement is affecting California’s and the nation’s immigrant and non-immigrant children and their families is from Stanford.

The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children? is from Brookings.

The Minneapolis immigration crackdown ended months ago. For these little kids, trauma remains is from The Associated Press.

Schools Saw Rising Student Anxiety From Immigration Enforcement in 2025-26 is from Ed Week.

Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance is from The Conversation.

STUDENT ABSENCES & ENROLLMENT

‘Climate of fear’: Student enrollment declining amid Trump’s immigration crackdown is from The Commonwealth Beacon.

ICE Raids Caused Enrollment to Drop. Now Districts Are Paying the Price is from The 74.

Immigrant student enrollment is dwindling at schools across the U.S. is from NBC News.

Potential Impacts of Increased Immigration Enforcement on School Attendance and Funding is from KFF.

What harsh immigration policies mean for students, families, and schools is from Brookings.

With Trump’s crackdown on immigration, public school enrollment across the U.S. is dwindling is from PBS.

Immigration Enforcement Actions and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects

Study: Foreign-Born Students Missed More School After Trump’s Inauguration is from The 74.

Immigration Enforcement Actions and Empty Desks: Persistent and Acute Attendance Effects

Decline in new immigrant students puts newcomer programs in jeopardy is from Ed Source.

Mass. public school enrollment is down 14K. Nearly half were English language learners.

Immigrant Students Fear Enforcement and Stay Out of School www.edweek.org/leadership/i…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) May 20, 2026 at 2:21 PM

Loss of multilingual students driving California’s declining enrollment, except in Bay Area is from the San Jose Mercury News.

“More than half of the decline is due to fewer non-native English speakers, according to Boston Public Schools’ data.”

English learner students are leaving Boston Public Schools in droves https://t.co/Avqw4YsNkE

— Alexander Russo (@alexanderrusso) July 20, 2026

‘Kids literally disappeared’: Minnesota schools lost at least 1,700 students following Operation Metro Surge www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0…

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— Peter Greene (@palan57.bsky.social) September 2, 2026 at 6:06 PM

ADDENDUM: TEACHER TRAUMA

Immigration Enforcement Takes Heavy Emotional Toll on K-12 Educators is from Ed Week.

Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15th.

You might be interested in The Best Resources For Hispanic Heritage Month.

Empowering Histories is a site set-up by Matt Vriesman, the 2023 National History Teacher of the Year.

Here’s how he describes it:

All my materials are organized chronologically by AP units and are tied directly to the College Board’s Key Concepts. However, these lessons work great in on-level high school and middle school history classrooms as well. All of the “supplementary materials” could easily be turned into full lessons, but I understand the pressure of trying to fit in all of the content and the writing skills required for this course, and only so much time can be devoted to each idea. Each lesson is designed not only to expose students to modern antiracist historical research, but also to facilitate their growth as analytical historical writers, therefore some of my best practices for thesis writing and document analysis (S.P.Y. Method) are sprinkled throughout. I understand that every history teacher has their own “must use” secondary sources for the curriculum and its impossible to use every good source, therefore, some of the “slides presentations” are designed for you to be able to introduce students to an important empowering or antiracist idea, even if you don’t have time in your curriculum for the full lesson.

I’m adding this info to The Best Places To Find Free (And Good) Lesson Plans On The Internet.

Unusual Suspects ia great new game from Neal.fun.

You’re provided simple descriptions of “suspects” and have to draw them like a police sketch artist.  After you finish, you’re shown the actual “suspect” and AI grades you (generously) on how well you did.

Most ELL teachers have done a similar activity in the classroom where you tape pictures of people around the room, say one of them committed a crime, provide a description, and then students have to select the correct “suspect.”

In many ways, Unusual Suspects is similar to the famous  Draw A Stickman game, which my students absolutely loves – until our district inexplicably blocked it.

Several Teachers at a nearby middle school were reading one of my books and invited me to attend their discussion group.

I had a great time – and I think they did, too!

I’ve done something like that now-and-then over the years in-person and virtually for educators and classes, and always enjoyed them.

I have a little more availability now that I’m retired, and would be happy to visit in-person if you’re in the Sacramento area or virtually anywhere else.

You can contact me on social media or at mrferlazzo at aol dot com.

FYI, here are free resources from all my books, including our newest one, The Better Teacher’s Toolbox.

Valiphotos / Pixabay

It’s that time of year!

You might be interested in The Best Sites For Images Of Fall Foliage (& For Teaching About The Season).

geralt / Pixabay

I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful.

Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful.  And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education.  I may also include my own comments or related links.

This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts.

Here are this week’s sentences:

The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit—after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one? 

Evidence-informed should not be reduced to evidence-dictated.

Across four studies, participants with stronger “dangerous world beliefs” overestimated the likelihood of harmful events, and viewed unfamiliar faces as more threatening and less trustworthy.

But in a world where it is often hard to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else, the challenge of explaining the world to a 10-year-old, or designing a jar that an octogenarian can open, is sometimes just a prompt to do a better job of what we were trying to do in the first place.

This means, in part, that the pushback on ed-tech is framed in terms of “bans” — that is, in terms of an absence or a lack — rather than as an opportunity to do something else with the limited amount of time that one has in a class, in a day, in a week, in an academic year. There’s always an opportunity cost in any curricular or instructional decision; educators know that. But ed-tech proponents make it sound as though the cost of not using technology means that there is somehow nothing in its place.  See The Best Posts & Articles Highlighting Why We Need To Be Very Careful Around Ed Tech

Research has found that a willingness to ask for help is crucial to achievement.

“The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.”

Studies simplify reality; classrooms are messy and complex. Teachers shouldn’t just follow research like a recipe—it should sharpen their judgment, not replace it. See The Best Resources Showing Why We Need To Be “Data-Informed” & Not “Data-Driven” and The Best Resources For Understanding How To Interpret Education Research

Today, Aroneanu said, movements are built not necessarily on what people think, but instead on what they feel.

Researchers found that simply repeating a decision can reshape what we prefer, causing familiar choices to feel better than alternatives.

When people let a chatbot do their writing—even if they’re guiding and carefully reviewing its work—they might not realize that it’s doing some of their thinking too

A few years ago, I edited an essay by the children’s-book author Katherine Marsh that identified one reason young kids were less motivated to read: Schools often push them toward a “hyperfocus on analysis” and give precedence to individual paragraphs and sentences rather than entire narratives. But, Marsh argues, “the best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story.” And a great way to get a kid interested in a story is by reading it aloud to them.

First teachers were going to make students transgender, and now they’re turning them into robots

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 21, 2026 at 5:44 PM

I am SO tired of reading articles like these from professors who, in many cases, might just be too lazy to change how they teach their classes &, instead, want to throw up their hands & complain about the sky falling ——A Society of Cheats www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) August 30, 2026 at 9:06 AM

Things #Teachers don’t talk about: Teacher input is often requested after a decision has already been made. The meeting is not about choosing a solution. It is about getting teachers to accept it.

— Ken | The Real Marvel Teacher 🍎 (@MarvelTeacher2) August 27, 2026

I appreciate that Dolly Parton played no part in “dress respectability” and, by her own account, modeled her aesthetic after a town “tramp,” who she thought was beautiful. She separated aesthetics from character and understood “classiness” to be about how you treat people.

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) August 26, 2026

these people threw tantrums about remote learning for years just to turn around & do this https://t.co/tgnnQubFI7

— andrea (@teachbk) August 23, 2026

TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay

As regular readers know, I retired from the classroom last year.

However, I immediately began volunteering in two places – as a tutor at our local Juvenile Hall, and at an elementary school working with ELL Newcomers.

I begin my second year working with the ELL Newcomers on Friday, where I’ll teach a pull out class of nine students, mixed with a range from second-to-sixth grade.

Here’s my plan for the class:

1. Welcome them and introduce myself
2. Give each student this Find_Someone_Who sheet, where they have to get up, go around, speak with each other student, and write down names of students who like the pictured items.  I’ll, of course, model it first.
3. We’ll come back together, and I’ll ask each student to share one thing they learned (“Juan likes dogs.”)
4. Then I’ll distribute this Make_Me_A_Card sheet.  Each student will have time to complete it with a picture and/or words.  If there’s time, I’ll ask them to share with a partner and/or the entire class.  Whatever we don’t finish, we’ll complete next week.

Teaching this kind of class is a different kettle of fish from teaching secondary newcomers, which is why I wanted to do it during my retirement!

I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Starting Off The New School Year In English Language Learner Classes.

Every teacher knows the burden and the ridiculousness of the annual “new initiatives” that come out of their district central offices.

And every teacher know that most of them go nowhere.

I would strongly recommend that every district superintendent read this Harvard Business Review article, Is Your Company Suffering from Initiative Overload? (they can also listen to it as a podcast).

Just about everything in it can be applied to schools.

Good luck to everybody out there who’s supposed to implement this year’s new initiatives!