Every classroom develops its own private vocabulary for the ups and downs of getting an education, and English has built up an especially colorful set of these expressions. When a student finally makes the grade, aces an exam, or admits to cramming the night before a test, they’re reaching for idioms that have circulated through…
Strong ESL parent communication starts with a reliable translation system, communication channels parents actually open (phone and text over email-only), and first contact that’s positive before it’s ever necessary. Skip the newsletter-only approach — a 2019 Wyoming study found that only 4.29% of administrators saw ELL families as highly involved, even though nearly two-thirds agreed…
Kahoot for ESL teachers is strongest as a free Kahoot! Go subscription for most classrooms, since the free tier already covers 40 live players per game — the real upgrade trigger isn’t player count, it’s Team mode, a built-in setting that lets students share one device per group and forces them to argue out an…
Duolingo works well as a free vocabulary and grammar supplement for ESL students, but it is not a classroom curriculum on its own — it barely touches real speaking practice. The bigger issue for 2026: Duolingo for Schools, the free teacher dashboard that made the app usable in a classroom, is being sunset on July…
Nearpod for ESL teachers works best as a Gold-tier subscription ($159/year) once a class grows past 40 students, since the free Silver plan caps joins at 40 and storage at 300 MB. The real value for language classrooms isn’t the slide-sharing — it’s that every student’s screen stays locked to the teacher’s pace, which solves…
Subject-verb agreement sticks when students stop guessing and start running a fixed checklist: find the real subject, ignore the phrase in between, and match the verb to it. The seven fixes below — crossing out prepositional phrases, anchoring indefinite pronouns, flipping inverted sentences, isolating collective nouns, daily proofreading, relay-style drills, and live speaking correction —…
English punctuation runs on eight core rules: end marks close every sentence, commas separate items and join certain clauses, semicolons link two complete sentences, colons introduce lists or explanations, and apostrophes mark contractions and possession. Quotation marks frame direct speech, and capitalization pairs with several of these marks rather than working alone. Mandarin, Japanese, and…
A genuine speech or language delay shows up in a student’s first language too, not just in English, and it comes with missed milestones — no two-word phrases by age 2, speech that’s still mostly unintelligible to strangers past age 3. Normal second-language acquisition, by contrast, only affects the new language and often includes a…
Gifted ESL students need work that moves faster than the rest of the class, not more of the same worksheet. The fix is curriculum compacting (skip what they’ve already mastered), depth-and-complexity tasks instead of extra practice, and grouping them with intellectual peers instead of making them the unpaid tutor for slower classmates. Language level and…
Teaching ESL students with intellectual disability works best when you break tasks into single steps, pair visual input with every verbal instruction, and keep routines predictable enough that the student can anticipate what comes next. Scaffold heavily at first, then pull support back once the student shows they can carry a step alone. The goal…
NN 
EN 
ZH 
ZH_CN 
KO 
VI 
FR 
AR 
ES 
HI 
PT 
BN 
RU 
JA 
TR 
DE 
IT 
PL 
ID 
TH 
FA 
UK 
TL 
HE 
UR 
SW 
RO 
NL 
MS 
TA 
PS 
HU 
EL 
SV 
NB 
DA 
CS 
SR 
AM