New demands of the Common Core State Standards imply instructional transformations for all classrooms in the United States, but teachers of students designated as English language learners (ELLs) are among those most likely to feel the impact in their daily professional lives. Language is an integral part of classroom learning in all subject…

Teachers of English language learners (ELLs), expected to address grade-level standards and prepare ELLs for standardized assessments, have the difficult task of designing instruction that meets the range of needs in their classrooms. When these learners have experienced limited or interrupted education, the challenges intensify. Whereas…

In both second language (L2) research and pedagogy, individual words have been considered the basic lexical unit; this is not surprising, because individual words are convenient to identify, teach, and work with (Schmitt, 2010). However, there is a growing awareness that language users do not always process language word by word, but also make use…

Calls to integrate media literacy into K-12 language classrooms appear to have gone largely unheeded. However, media literacy skills are seen as crucial for 21st-century learners. This article answers the calls for a focus on media literacy in the language classroom by addressing both why and how systematic attention might be brought to this issue…

TED (Technology Entertainment Design), a collection of regularly updated talks, offers a web-based platform that is easily accessible. This platform affords language learners across multiple proficiency levels an opportunity to develop autonomy and critical thinking skills alongside their second language (L2) development. With an international…

Writing can be a difficult task for many students in today's classrooms; however, for students who are culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), writing can be especially difficult. These students often are in the process of developing their facility with the English language, and they possess cultural backgrounds that differ from those of…

Teachers of English as a second language (ESL) are often on the frontline of working with adult ESL learners who are facing a difficult developmental pathway to academic and/or economic success. These learners come to the task of learning English with widely varying schooling experiences, degrees of first language literacy, and English language…

The authors describe a multimodal concept drawing activity designed to facilitate students' understanding of terms used within an assignment in a first-year college writing course. In this activity, students write ideas, read definitions, study images, and create multimodal representations of a term in groups of classroom peers. The activity…

Using digital stories to have students tell about themselves, share their culture with the class, and learn from each other can help with establishing rapport, shows respect for different cultures, and can be motivating for students and their language teachers. However, what happens after that? After making their first video, students have some…

In the context of more diverse communicative practices and social relations in globalization, scholars are increasingly defining English as constituting socially constructed situational norms in specific contexts of interaction, and not a homogeneous language or even discrete varieties of English. This shift requires treating pragmatics and not…

This article describes three service-learning projects implemented in three different ESL programs in the United States. Each description includes typical course goals, service-learning assignments, reflection activities, student learning outcomes, and pedagogical challenges. The first project was developing digital literacy through…

This article discusses the significance of inferencing in reading comprehension and addresses theoretical and practical issues related to teaching inferencing in English classrooms. The author explains the nature of inferencing in reading and, drawing on previous research findings and his own reflections on teaching reading to English as a second…

English as a second language (ESL) writing teachers face distinct challenges as they try to help students write in the language that is appropriate and natural to the native-English-speaking audience. It is disheartening when the writings of even advanced-level second language students often contain many awkward sentences and non-English-like…

Developing assessments within a program can create more useful measures of our students' language. This includes rating scales used in performance assessments such as writing or speaking tests. This article describes the process of development, use, and revision of a writing placement scale by teachers in an intensive English language program. To…

Using Blogger, a free Google-powered weblog-generating website, English as a second language (ESL) instructors can create motivating and empowering learning opportunities for students. Instructors can generate their own blogs, including not only a class blog that builds a community-learning setting online, but also a teacher's homepage to…