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Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL): Franklin Articles+ - journal articles in multiple fields

Search for articles with Franklin Articles+

Franklin Articles+ is a large database that contains records for a variety of materials, including scholarly articles, books, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, videos, music, images, and more.


Advantages of using Franklin: Articles+

  • Covers multiple fields, such as education, language, linguistics, psychology, and sociology.
  • Peer review limit, unlike Google Scholar.
  • Limit by content type, date, and language.
  • Relevance ranking algorithm powerful
  • Full-text limit will limit results to publications to which the Library has access.
  • Citations can be generated in APA format, as well as other styles.

Scholarly Publications

To access articles that are peer-reviewed, note that limit in Franklin Articles+

Image of selecting Peer Review to refine your search in Articles+


Search for articles in a specific journal

Click on the Advanced search option, choose Publication title, and enter the journal name in quotation marks.

Screenshot example of advanced search for specific publication title

Learn to Use Franklin Articles+ better

Fun Search Syntax for Franklin Articles+

Keywords: When two or more terms are entered, they are searched with an AND in between

first language  is searched as:  first AND language


Phrase Searching: enclose the phrase in quotes.

"learner autonomy"


Boolean Operators  (AND, OR, NOT) -  must be written in all capital letters 

multi-level OR multilevel OR "mixed level"

Operators are processed from left to right.  If a search contains parentheses, operators within parentheses are processed first.

To exclude items in an Articles+ search, use the NOT operator or minus sign (-) character before a term (no space between minus sign and term)

science NOT "science fiction"

science -"science fiction"


Wildcards / Truncation

The asterisk (*) will match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. 

motivat* will find motivate or motivating or motivation

col*r   will find color or colour

The question mark (?) will match any one character. 

organi?ation  will find  organization or organisation

Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search or within double quotes (phrase searching).  


Proximity - Proximity searches limit result sets to terms within a specified number of words from each other. Enclose search terms in quotation marks and use the tilde (~) followed by a number to indicate the maximum distance between the search terms.

"second language english adult learners"~50  - these terms will be within 50 words of each other in any order


Term Weighting - Extra weight can be given to a term using ^n , this will boost the "score" of the term in the relevance ranking sort

digital^5 literacy

"curriculum design"^7 pragmatics

"task-based assessment"~5 AND "second language" AND adult^8

^#word means that that search term or phrase has # times the importance of the other term(s).   


Field Searching:  You can specify that a word be in the author, title, or abstract like this

author:(butler)

title:(esl) 

abstract:(pragmatics)


Stopwords - Articles+ maintains language-specific lists of stop words.  These are filtered out in searches except when they are part of phrase searches. Stop words are chosen according to the following basic criteria.  Current English stop words in Articles+ include "a", "an", "the", "and", "but", "or", "it", "of", "on", "with", "in", "is" and "are", but do not include "will" since it has a common secondary meaning as a noun.

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