Recent sites added to the 6,000 links on Mr. Ferlazzo's English Website assisting English Language Learners (and younger native speakers). These sites include ones for English, Social Studies, Science, and Math.

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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

Over 100 Of My Videos About Instruction
Three Accessible Ways To Search For & Find My “Best” Lists
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?
Republicans Propose – Again – Eliminating Funds To Support English Language Learners
I Wrote Nearly 100 NY Times Posts On Teaching ELLs – Here Are Links To All Of Them
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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.

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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!

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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.

In a classroom, statistical learning (SL) translates into activities that prioritize pattern recognition, high-frequency exposure, and structured input over explicit rule-memorization.

1. Word Segmentation & Phonemic Awareness

Because SL helps learners find word boundaries in fluent speech, teachers can use “chunky” or rhythmic speech to make these transitions more obvious.

Robot Talk: Teachers speak in a robotic, segmented way (e.g., “I-spy-a-c-l-o-ck”) and have students blend the sounds back together.
Elkonin (Sound) Boxes: Students move a physical counter or bead into a box for every individual sound (phoneme) they hear in a word, helping their brains “track” the probability of sound sequences.
Movement-Based Segmentation: Students “stomp” or “tap” for each sound they hear, using physical cues to reinforce the statistical breaks between units.

2. Orthographic Regularity (Spelling Patterns)

Students learn to recognize which letters typically appear together (e.g., “ck” usually follows a short vowel) through repeated, consistent exposure rather than just rules.

Word Sorts: Students categorize word cards based on specific spelling patterns (e.g., sorting words that end in silent “e” vs. those that do not) to see the regularity in action.
Pattern Highlighting: In a text, students highlight every instance of a specific target pattern (like the “-ai-” in rain and train) to increase the density of exposure to that regularity.

3. Grammar via “Frequent Frames”

Instead of teaching a full grammar table, teachers provide “frames” where only one variable changes, allowing the brain to isolate the repeating grammatical structure.

Sentence Scaffolding: Using a frame like “I can [verb]” or “I don’t [verb]” repeatedly with dozens of different verbs helps the brain recognize “can” and “don’t” as structural markers that precede an action.
High-Density Input Flooding: During a lesson on the past tense, the teacher might tell a story where nearly every sentence uses a regular “-ed” verb, “flooding” the student with enough examples to trigger automatic pattern extraction.

4. Incidental Learning via Data

Students can develop both language and statistical literacy by engaging with data that is personally relevant

Classroom Surveys: Students collect data on classmates (e.g., “How many pairs of shoes do you own?”) and analyze the results, which forces them to use specific comparative language (e.g., “more than,” “the most”) in a meaningful, repetitive context.
“What’s Going on in This Graph?”: Students look at a data visualization stripped of its context and must use their existing knowledge of patterns to predict the topic and describe the trends.

For older learners (middle school, high school, and adults), statistical learning moves away from simple rhymes and toward pattern analysis and data-driven language discovery. The focus shifts to identifying the “hidden logic” of complex English structures through high-density exposure.

1. Linguistic “Input Flooding” & Textual Enhancement

Instead of memorizing rules, students are “flooded” with a specific grammatical structure in a natural context to trigger the brain’s pattern-recognition.

Themed Case Studies: Provide a 10-line story or article where a target structure (e.g., the passive voice or relative clauses) is seeded multiple times.
Visual Enhancement: Use bolding, underlining, or color-coding for those target forms in a text. For example, bold all instances of “who,” “which,” and “where” in a technical document to make the syntactic pattern more salient.
Verb Re-ordering: Have students read a story, then give them a scrambled list of the verbs used. They must reconstruct the sequence based on the logical and statistical flow of the narrative.

2. Morphological Analysis (Word Architecture)

Older learners use statistical learning to “decode” long academic words by recognizing recurring prefixes, suffixes, and roots

Root Quizzing with “Paint Chips”: Use hardware store paint chips to color-code word parts (e.g., blue for math roots, green for science). Students combine these physical “bricks” to see how meaning changes statistically when a prefix like “re-” or suffix like “-ful” is added.
Word Family Sorting: Similar to “fact families” in math, students group words by their shared roots (e.g., dictate, predict, contradict) to build an intuitive “database” of how Latin and Greek roots function in English.

3. Data-Driven Language Projects

Using real-world data allows students to notice the frequency and “probability” of certain terms in specific professional or social contexts.

Social Media Analytics: Students analyze the language patterns in different types of social media accounts (e.g., celebrities vs. news outlets), identifying high-frequency vocabulary or “frequent frames” unique to each.
Census & Survey Data: Students conduct surveys (e.g., “What are your career goals?”) and create bar graphs or pie charts. This forces them to use comparative “statistical language”—like “the majority of,” “twice as likely as,” or “rarely”—in a repetitive, meaningful way.
“What’s Going On in This Graph?”: Present an unlabeled graph and have students predict its context based on the trends shown. This builds “visual literacy” and forces them to generate descriptive hypotheses using specific language patterns.

4. Guided Discovery & Priming

Instead of being given a rule, students are “primed” to find it themselves through structured tasks.

Language Experience Approach: A student dictates a sentence (e.g., “I late the work for bad traffic”), and the teacher writes the grammatically correct version (“I was late for work because traffic was bad”). The student then compares the two, using their own “internal statistics” to notice the discrepancies and correct their mental model.
Information Gap Games: In pairs, one student describes a complex image while the other draws it. They then compare the results and discuss which descriptive words were most “statistically effective” for achieving the correct result.

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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?

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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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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

Over 100 Of My Videos About Instruction

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

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?

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

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

More Recent Articles