Background and Goal of CAELA Network Adult ESL Resource Database
Adult ESL professional developers, trainers, and state staff need resources that help them deliver quality, evidence-based materials during training and in sustained follow-up activities.
Relevant resources In October 2007, the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), in a full and open competition, won a contract from the U.S. Department of Education to help states improve their capacity to provide high quality professional development that addresses the needs of educators working with adult English language learners. This project is named the CAELA Network. The goal of Task 4.1 for this contract is to provide an accessible resource repository of evidence-based information about adult English language instruction. Such a repository was created under a prior OVAE-funded project and well received in the field of adult English as a second language (ESL) education. As stipulated in the CAELA Network contract, CAELA Network staff will continue to build the database developed under the CAELA contract (see below). The description of the database here covers the composition of the database and the document classification system. This document concludes with proposed criteria for documents included in the CAELA Network Database.
Composition of the Database
From October 2004 – March 2008 (under the U.S. Department of Education Contract No. ED-04-CO-0031/0001) the Center for Adult English Language Acquisition (CAELA), adult ESL specialists and researchers at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) have been developing and populating a database of evidence-based documents. This database, the Adult ESL Resource Repository, provides bibliographic references (with links to the full text whenever possible) to documents useful to adult ESL practitioners. There are 202 documents in the database (as of 12/18/07). The documents describe research related to the field of adult ESL instruction, provide guides to current practice, and may point the way to further research.
The documents were selected for inclusion based on a set of criteria developed by CAELA staff. The U.S. Department of Education makes no claims regarding the quality of these documents. The majority of the documents in the database are recent, published since the year 2000; however, there are a few important works and statistical compilations from the late 1990s.
For a breakdown of the number of current document by type, click here.
To access the document classification scheme, click here.
To access the document selection criteria, click here.
To access the ESL Resource Database, click here.
