Register for the 2011 TESOL Academy: June 24-25
TESOL
University of Virginia, Northern Virginia Center
Falls Church, Va., USA

Register today! By attending the 2011 TESOL Academy, as ESOL professionals, you will have the opportunity to

• Spend 10 dynamic hours in one area of concentrated study with a top leader in the field.
• Network and share your work with colleagues from around the world.
• Gain practical insights on how to implement the latest classroom practices.
• Reflect on your teaching and learning.
• Earn continuing education credits that advance your career.
• Build valuable professional and personal relationships that will last a lifetime.

Register today for the next TESOL virtual seminar
TESOL
Teaching Large Heterogeneous Classes in ELT Contexts Worldwide,
by Penny Ur
What is a large class? What is a heterogeneous class? What are the problems we encounter when we have to teach classes that are both large and heterogeneous? As with many educational problems, there are no easy solutions. The presenter proposes and discusses a series of practical teaching principles, illustrated by practical procedures, that involve very little (or no) extra preparation and that go some way towards providing opportunities for effective learning. Read more about the seminar; the deadline for registration is May 1.

Thursday, May 5 at 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Eastern time in the United States.
(Thursday, May 5 at 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. GMT)

Read about TESOL's other virtual seminars.More

Contribute to the TESOL convention Slideshare page
TESOL
Did you present at last month's convention in New Orleans? If so, please share your presentation and handouts on the 2011 TESOL convention SlideShare page! It's a quick and easy way to keep the spirit of the convention ongoing and to share valuable information with your colleagues. Go to Slideshare today to share your presentations and check out other presentations.More

SUCCEED Act would unite our communities
The Hill
Last April, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's signature authorized SB 1070, imposing a set of harsh immigration enforcement laws that sought to reduce the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona. Rather than alienating immigrants, our country now has the chance to pass positive legislation with the Strengthen and Unite Communities with Civics Education & English Development (SUCCEED) Act, which would help immigrant populations integrate into American society. The SUCCEED Act would provide for English literacy instruction on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, naturalization proceedings, civic participation and U.S. history and government.More

Feds soften 15-state requirement for new ELL tests
Education Week
In their final notice calling for consortia of states to apply for federal funds to create English language proficiency tests aligned with the commoncore academic standards, federal officials say applicants will get extra points if they have at least 15 states as members, but they won't be disqualified if they don't. The notice calls the 15-state minimum a "competitive preference priority," not a requirement. That's a change from the notice that first proposed the $10.7 million grant competition for a new generation of English-proficiency tests to be created as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.More

How do Cantonese-speaking ELLs learn to read English?
Education Week
Decoding words doesn't play as large of a role in how Cantonese-speaking children living in the United States learn to read English as it does for children who speak only English at home or English language learners who speak Spanish at home, according to a new study. The author of the study found that reading comprehension for Cantonese-speaking children is equally dependent on decoding ability and oral-language proficiency, as measured by tests of oral vocabulary and verbal memory.More

Government failure to establish new English Learning Labs affect rural students in India
The Times of India
India: The failure of collegiate education department to impart aural and oral skills in English language to students in government degree colleges has deprived thousands a chance to be globally acceptable. Be it employment opportunities either at call centers or marketing firms, the chances of these students making it to the interview-level look grim because of the failure of the government to establish even one new English Language Lab in the past two years.More

Newcomers face obstacles to learn English
The Quad-City Times
The exercise is tedious to the point of being painful. For nearly 45 minutes, teacher Brandon Bufe stands at the front of a classroom occupied by 14 adult refugees, largely from Nepal, Burma and the Congo, explaining how to write a check. The name of the business to which money is owed goes here, he says. And your name goes there. Laboriously, the students write on the long line the name of the subsidized apartment complex where many of them live and their own name on the short line. But several transpose the two.More

China struggles with English
The Wall Street Journal
China: Mandarin lessons may be the trend in the West, but the push in China is to study English. Now, two language-teaching companies have given China poor marks for its English abilities. China, according to two separate studies published recently, is distinguishing itself for the number of people studying, not for their skill levels. "China still has a way to go before it can consider itself adequately proficient in English," according to English First BV. Separately, California-based GlobalEnglish Corp. says many of the 11,000 people it recently surveyed in China wouldn't be able to keep up with a business meeting conducted in English.More

Anger over English lesson funding cuts
The Guardian
Great Britain: Teachers have reacted with anger to the prime minister's call for immigrants to take English lessons, arguing that the coalition has cut funds for these classes. At a speech on immigration, David Cameron warned that immigrants unable to speak English or unwilling to integrate have created a "kind of discomfort and disjointedness," which has disrupted communities across Great Britain. But teachers of English said new rules, devised by the coalition government, would mean far fewer immigrants could afford to learn basic English.More

Evolution of language takes unexpected turn
Wired News
It's widely thought that human language evolved in universally similar ways, following trajectories common across place and culture, and possibly reflecting common linguistic structures in our brains. But a massive, millennium-spanning analysis of humanity's major language families suggests otherwise. Instead, language seems to have evolved along varied, complicated paths, guided less by neurological settings than cultural circumstance. If our minds do shape the evolution of language, it's likely at levels deeper and more nuanced than many researchers anticipated. More

Study: All languages may originate from Africa
PhysOrg.com
Previous language trees only go back as far as 9,000 years and linguists have believed that language was not able to be traced farther back than that. However, Quentin Atkinson's claims could have language going back as far as 100,000 years. In Atkinson's study he looks, not at words, but at phonemes which are the consonants, vowels and tones which make up language. By applying mathematical methods, he has discovered a pattern within the more than 500 languages throughout the world.More

How the bilingual brain copes with aging
ScienceDaily
Older bilingual adults compensate for age-related declines in brainpower by developing new strategies to process language, according to a recent study published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition. Concordia University researchers studied two groups of fluently bilingual adults — aged from 19 to 35 and from 60 to 81 years old — and found significant age-related differences in the manner their brains interpreted written language.More