A free ELPS resource for teachers, and for the districts that train them

Enabling Learning has spent years preparing bilingual and ESL teachers, both pre-service teachers in their preparation programs and in-service teachers in the districts we partner with. The ELPS Online Helper grew directly out of that work, and out of a problem we watched teachers run into again and again.

For a long time, the foundational reference that emergent bilingual teachers rely on lived in hard-to-reach places. It was scattered across many separate documents, or it was bound into printed reference books, organized so that teachers flip between proficiency levels and language domains, resources that teachers and districts had to purchase before they could be used. We hold no judgment about that. Printed materials carry real production costs, and the people who make them are trying to serve teachers too. But we keep returning to a simple conviction: this kind of foundational reference is exactly the sort of thing that should be freely accessible to every teacher who needs it.

The web is what makes that conviction practical, and it lets the reference do more than a printed book ever could. Instead of pages you flip between, the levels and the language domains are connected in one place. It is faster to search, and it stays current as the standards are updated, so a teacher is never working from a copy that has quietly gone out of date.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has allowed us to go a step further. The reference is paired with Verónica, our AI teaching assistant, running on multilingual language models we control, with real safeguards behind her. Verónica is the same engine that powers our paid courses and trainings, and we have chosen to offer that same core here, at no cost, because we believe a resource this foundational should be open to everyone.