Steve Gill is the creator and co-author of the ELL Critical Data Process and several other books related to this area. His wife, Ushani Nanayakkara is the co-author of many of the books. Both Steve and Ushani are multilingual and have a passion for language learning. Steve has worked in the schools for over 30 years as a school psychologist and specializes in the evaluation of language learners. These two aspects combined with his hobby of photography, and a little bit of luck, to create books that focus on compelling content for language learners. This happened after Steve was experimenting with a new lens and took a picture of a toy dinosaur in front of a water feature. This photograph looked “real” and Steve hung this in his office. The students liked the photo so much that they brought friends to look that this, and this lead to Steve making hundreds of additional photos, including animal photos. These can be leveraged to help language learners focus on the core areas of language learning (listening, speaking, reading and writing).
The three books, Writing and Speaking, Reading and Listening, and Let’s Talk, provide examples of using compelling content in these core areas. These books are available on Amazon.com. This website is being developed to allow teachers and parents to download existing and new photos to use to support the development of these core areas.