Voice of America offers an online resource for English language teachers
TESOL
The Classroom, a Voice of America online resource, is a great place for English language teachers to find content-relevant materials. Content includes American life and culture, economics, science and technology, Internet, health and much more. The Classroom also has an interactive idiom dictionary, business English wordbooks and other resources. Materials are organized by article. Each article has several classroom activities inducing comprehension skills, vocabulary, facts, listening skills and exercises for expanding students' English. The site also offers video, worksheets, audio, quizzes and numerous other teaching resources.More

New posts to the TESOL Blog
TESOL
Have you checked out the TESOL Blog lately? If not, you've missed Dudley Reynolds's account of the wildly successful TESOL Conference in Qatar on Putting Research Into Practice, Joe McVeigh's seasoned take on lesson planning and Heidi Caspar's ideas on keeping student's engaged now that classroom routine has set in. Please take a moment to read these and other posts on the TESOL Blog and leave a comment for our intrepid bloggers.More

TESOL Core Certificate Program Accepting Applications
TESOL
The TESOL Core Certificate Program offers 130 hours of online training in the theory and practice of English language teaching. No prior training or experience is necessary. If you would like to participate, however, you must act quickly. Applications are due Monday, 31 October 2011. For more information, please contact edprograms@tesol.org.More

Teacher evaluation scaled back in revised ESEA draft
Education Week
Legislation to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has garnered a bipartisan seal of approval, thanks to a last-minute change scaling back the teacher-evaluation mandate in the bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. But civil rights groups still have major concerns about some of the proposal's accountability provisions. A revised version of the bill, put forth by Sen. Harkin, chairman of the Senate education committee, and Sen. Michael B. Enzi, R-Wyo., the panel's top Republican, largely would let states and districts decide whether and how to evaluate teachers. More

Ottawa: Don't let budget cuts hit bilingualism
The Canadian Press via The Globe and Mail
Canada: The federal government has to be careful that its planned budget cuts don't have an undue impact on bilingualism, the commissioner of official languages warned. In his annual report, Graham Fraser said official languages shouldn't bear an unfair proportion of the reductions. "I am not claiming that official languages are being targeted specifically — or that they should be exempted — but there is a risk that they will be unduly affected," he said at a news conference.More

Student progress can be tied to teacher's school
The Associated Press via Seattle Post Intelligencer
The academic progress of public school students can be traced, in part, to where their teachers went to college, according to new research by the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research. But the center's director, Dan Goldhaber, cautioned that the study is just a first step toward determining what kind of training — not where the training occurred — best prepares teachers for excellence in the classroom. Even so, it's the kind of information U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan would like every school to have access to and that's why he recently announced a new program to use federal dollars to pay for similar research. More

Global teacher shortage threatens progress on education
The Guardian
The world urgently needs to recruit more than 8 million extra teachers, according to UN estimates, warning that a looming shortage of primary school teachers threatens to undermine global efforts to ensure universal access to primary education by 2015. At least 2 million new teaching positions will need to be created by 2015, the UN said in a report. An additional 6.2 million teachers will need to be recruited to maintain current workforces and replace those expected to retire or leave classrooms due to career changes, illnesses or death.More

University of Leicester announces groundbreaking English language training initiative in Kurdistan — Iraq
24dash.com
Iraq: A British university is breaking new ground in international collaboration by working with a Kurdistan University to set up an English language center for students. It will be located in Erbil (Hewler), the capital city of the Federal Region of Kurdistan — Iraq.More

Key education groups to Harkin: Let's slow down on ESEA
Education Week
Five key education groups, including the National Association of Elementary School Principals and the American Association of School Administrators, are urging Sen. Tom Harkin to put the brakes on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. They have four key concerns, outlined in an Oct. 16 letter to Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and the ranking Republican Michael Enzi. More

LAUSD agrees to revise how English learners, blacks are taught
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to sweeping revisions in the way it teaches students learning English, as well as black youngsters, settling a federal civil rights investigation that examined whether the district was denying the students a quality education. The settlement closes what was the Obama administration's first civil rights investigation launched by the Department of Education, and officials said that it would serve as a model for other school districts around the country.More

New York puts pressure on New York City schools over English language learners
The New York Times
New York City schools are broadly failing to meet the needs of many of their thousands of students who are still learning English, and they must improve or they may face sanctions, state education officials announced. "Clearly the services are poor, and the best indication of that are the student outcomes," John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, said. As a measure of the problem, he said, in 2010 only 7 percent of the city's English language learners were found to have graduated on time and ready for college and careers.More

Mixed ruling on Alabama immigration law
The Associated Press via The New York Times
In a blow to Alabama's toughest-in-the-nation immigration law, a federal appeals court sided with the Obama administration when it blocked public schools from checking the immigration status of students. The decision from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also said police can't charge immigrants who are unable to prove their citizenship, but it let some of the law stand, giving supporters a partial victory. The decision was only temporary and a final ruling wasn't expected for months, after judges can review more arguments. More

Studying too much is a new no-no in upwardly mobile South Korea
The Wall Street Journal
South Korea: On a recent afternoon, Jung Doo-gil walked into an after-school academy with a hidden camera in her purse in search of a peculiar type of wrongdoing: overeducation. She has joined a nationwide cat-and-mouse game among parents zealous for more education for their children and government and activists who are trying to reduce the fever. Caught in the middle are the managers and teachers working in after-school academies called hagwons.More

Student IDs that reveal test scores deemed illegal
Orange County Register
California education officials say an Orange County high school that issued color-coded identification cards to students this year based on their standardized test scores is violating the students' privacy and the unlawful practice should be curtailed.More

A 1-woman window on Indian Higher Education
The Chronicle of higher education
India: Malini Sen oversees a weekly education supplement of The Times of India that goes out in 22 regional editions to 3.2 million subscribers. Like other editors around the world, she is scrambling to figure out how to deliver the news and other reader services in online forums, on social media and on mobile phones. (India has close to a billion mobile phone users.) In Sen's case, those readers are often parents and students.More

Australia to end IELTS monopoly on language test for student visas
Australian Visa Bureau
Australian: The Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship has announced its intention to accept results from tests other than the International English Language Testing System in assessing language level for an Australia visa. From November 2011, prospective international students to Australia can be tested via the Test of English as a Foreign Language, Pearson's PTE Academic test and the Cambridge English Advanced Test during their visa application process. More

Squeezed out in India, students turn to US
The New York Times
India: Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.More

Language study: Reducing the impact of language barriers
Rosetta Stone via Forbes
In global, multicultural organizations, simply expecting all employees to speak one common language, such as English, marginalizes the potential impact of international talent and leaves monolingual staff ill-equipped to help the organization compete effectively in a globalized environment. The survey found that foreign language skills will be even more vital in the future and that language abilities can help executives advance their careers, speed overseas expansion and boost corporate — as well as personal — success.More

What's behind the culture of academic dishonesty
KQED
Academic dishonesty, plagiarism and cheating are hardly new. And as the history of the banking industry and baseball demonstrate, cheating scandals aren't just limited to schools. With numerous incidents making headlines in recent months, however, questions are being raised about the validity and the pressures of standardized testing, as well as the security of testing practices. And some are asking if it's time to scrutinize the underlying behaviors and motivation for all this cheating. More

'The Learning': Social costs of teaching abroad
National Public Radio
A century ago, American teachers went to the Philippines to establish the public school system there. English was established as the language of instruction. Now some schools in the U.S. have been recruiting Filipino teachers. The new documentary The Learning takes a closer look at this trend, following four experienced teachers who left their homes and families in the Philippines to teach in Baltimore, where students are predominantly African-American. The foreign teachers fought to overcome cultural differences, bring order to classrooms and form meaningful bonds with local students.More

ELL 'shadowing' shows promise
Education Week
It's a professional development tool that stems from the concept of taking a walk in someone else's — in this case a student's — shoes. And in one California school, it has reportedly helped close the achievement gap for English language learners. The technique, which second-language acquisition expert Ivannia Soto began using in 2003, is called ELL shadowing. A teacher or administrator follows an English language learner to several classes. Neither the student nor his or her teachers know the real reason the observer in the back of the room is there, which is to look specifically at the student's use of academic language. More

How games can influence learning
KQED
What do games have anything to do with learning? When nationally recognized researchers, teachers, game-based schools and companies that develop educational games were asked how they see games fitting into the education landscape, they said it's about interaction, not isolation.More

How YouTube is changing the classroom
StateImpact
As long as there have been teachers, they've battled the same problems: How can they reach students of multiple ability levels at once, cover more course material in limited time, and find more time to engage with students one-on-one? Some educators think they've found a solution to all three problems in, of all things, YouTube. A small group of teachers nationwide is replacing in-class lectures with short online videos students watch at home.More