I've made many videos over the years, including quite a few animated ones with Education Week on differentiated instruction, learning transfer, and student motivation. You can see thirty of them all here. I've also made about more on TikTok, which you ...
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  1. Over 100 Of My Videos About Instruction
  2. Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists
  3. What Is “Statistical Learning,” Why Do Some Researchers Say It’s The Best Way To Learn A New Language, & What Could It Look Like In A Classroom?
  4. Republicans Propose – Again – Eliminating Funds To Support English Language Learners
  5. I Wrote Nearly 100 NY Times Posts On Teaching ELLs – Here Are Links To All Of Them
  6. More Recent Articles

Over 100 Of My Videos About Instruction

 

I’ve made many videos over the years, including quite a few animated ones with Education Week on differentiated instruction, learning transfer, and student motivation.

You can see thirty of them all here.

I’ve also made about more on TikTok, which you can see here.

I’ve begun uploading those TikTok videos to my YouTube Channel, which you can access here.

     

Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists

 

(Note: I am going to publish this same post regularly to remind regular readers and inform newer ones about how to access my “Best” lists)

 

As regular readers know, I have about 2,500 categorized and regularly updated “Best” lists.

You can find all of them in broad categories here. The link to that page can also be found at the top right of my blog: My Best Of Series

I also have them all on another page where they are listed in the chronological order in which I originally posted them. You can find that link at the top of my blog by first clicking on About and then scrolling down to Websites of the Year.

Over two thousand “Best” lists are a lot of best lists! Of course, Control + F on PCs and Command + F on Macs are great ways to search for keywords on those lists when you’re looking for something.

In an effort to make them both further accessible and to update many of them, I began posting “Best Lists Of The Week.” In those lists, I attempted to break my lists into more narrow categories while completely revising and updating them at the same time.

I’ve created about fifty of them so far and they encompass a several hundred “Best” lists. It will probably take a year-or-two to create ones that include all two-thousand, especially since I add new ones all the time.

You will find these newly categorized lists on a page titled My Best Of The Week, and they’ll be shown as “buttons” (you can see what they look like at the top of this blog post) listed alphabetically (more-or-less). You can also click on a link on the top right of the homepage of my blog. It says: My Best Of Week

I hope you find the lists, and the way they’re organized, helpful!

     

What Is “Statistical Learning,” Why Do Some Researchers Say It’s The Best Way To Learn A New Language, & What Could It Look Like In A Classroom?

WOKANDAPIX / Pixabay

 

This is an excerpt from a BBC article headlined What’s the best way to learn a new language?

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s a particularly interesting excerpt:

I was intentionally not told from the outset what the tasks were about. But the researchers later explained that they were designed to activate my brain’s cross-situational learning (CSL) skills: that’s our natural, instinctive ability to use statistics to gradually work out the meanings of words and basic grammar. You can learn more about statistical learning in language acquisition here, but it is essentially our brain’s inherent ability to recognise patterns and regularities in speech (such as which words pair well with each other) based on the frequency of their use.

“People can learn very, very fast simply by keeping track of the statistics in the environment,” says Rebuschat. “This type of task is designed to mimic real-world learning under immersion settings, where things are often ambiguous and we rarely receive immediate feedback.”

I had never heard for this kind of teaching before, so I searched Google for more information.  Here’s what Gemini told me (it sounds a lot like Inductive Teaching – The Best Resources About Inductive Learning & Teaching, with some jazz chants – The Best Sites (& Videos) For Learning About Jazz Chants, and LEA – THE BEST RESOURCES FOR LEARNING HOW TO USE THE LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE APPROACH):

In the classroom, Statistical Learning (SL) is the implicit process by which students acquire English by detecting recurring patterns, such as the probability that one sound or word follows another. Unlike explicit grammar drills, SL capitalizes on the brain’s natural ability to track regularities in speech and text.
 
Core Principles for Classroom Application
To leverage statistical learning, educators can focus on several key principles to make language patterns more salient for students:
  • The Regularity Principle: Learners naturally seek out frequent and consistent patterns. To help students acquire a specific target (e.g., the third-person “-s”), that target should be the most frequently occurring and consistent element in a given lesson.
  • High-Density Input: Rapid learning occurs when students are exposed to high-frequency examples of a language goal within a short period. For English Language Learners (ELLs), providing a higher density of exposures than they would find in a natural environment can speed up acquisition.
  • Minimal Variable Contexts: When teaching a new rule, keeping other parts of the sentence stable helps students isolate the pattern. For example, using different verbs but the same subject-verb agreement structure helps the brain “track” the intended grammatical rule.
  • Implicit Exposure: SL suggests that passive listening to sound sequences and word patterns allows units like words to “pop out” from a stream of speech. This supports using rich, continuous English input (like storytelling or audiobooks) rather than just isolated vocabulary lists.
 
Impact on Specific Language Skills
  • Word Segmentation: Students use transitional probabilities to determine where one word ends and the next begins in a fluent stream of speech.
  • Reading and Spelling: Children use SL to learn “orthographic regularities”—the typical patterns of letters and sounds in written English (e.g., recognizing that “kc” is rare and usually indicates a word boundary like “bookcase”).
  • Syntax and Grammar: SL helps students recognize which categories of words (like articles and nouns) typically appear together, allowing them to generalize rules to new sentences.
 
Benefits for Diverse Learners
  • Early Literacy Support: SL is a foundational mechanism for early literacy; children with stronger SL skills often perform better on lexical and reading tasks.
  • Language Disorders: For students with developmental language disorders, explicitly increasing the salience and frequency of statistical cues in classroom materials can help normalize their learning process.
     

Republicans Propose – Again – Eliminating Funds To Support English Language Learners

 

House Republicans unveiled a new budget proposal today that included, among other harmful policies, eliminating funds for Title III, which supports English Language Learners.

You can read about it at Education Week’s article, House GOP Endorses Education Cuts as Talks on Trump’s Budget Begin.

As in the past, some of the most terrible education proposals, including cutting ELL funds, will probably not make it through the budget process.

But it would be nice if the Republicans didn’t always start with such a bad beginning.  What’s the matter with these guys?

     

I Wrote Nearly 100 NY Times Posts On Teaching ELLs – Here Are Links To All Of Them

 

For several years, I regularly wrote posts for The NY Times Learning Network on teaching English Language Learners.

You can see all of them at ALL MY NY TIMES POSTS FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS – LINKED WITH DESCRIPTIONS.

     

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