Internet Reference Sites

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King Abdulaziz University

Internet Reference Sites

For English Language Teachers

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Listening & Speaking

1) http://www.elllo.org/

ESL: Listening & Speaking Practices: The website provides a wide range of listening and speaking activities. It also includes scripts of the listening exercises that help the students match what they read to what they listen to. The websites has video activities about people discussing different topics with quizzes and transcripts.

2) http://www.eslfast.com/robot/

2,000+ ESL/EFL Conversations on Different Topics Practice "Speaking" English with an Online Robot: Being one of the biggest and richest websites of ELS/EFL Conversations on different topics eslfast.com provides a huge number of conversations to practice speaking English with an online robot. The topics of conversations cover a large variety of situations of everyday life. What is remarkable about the website is that it includes three different contexts for each single situation. Following are some examples of the topics on the website: At a Hotel; At a Restaurant; At the Bank; At the Library; Buying a Car; Buying a House; College Life; Crime.

3) http://esl.about.com/

English Listening Skills and Activities-Effective Listening Practice: This website has plenty of English listening skills for ESL /EFL learners and teachers. It also contains comprehension quizzes for listening skill improvement for beginner, intermediate and advanced ESL EFL English levels.

4) http://www.englishpond.com/listening/index.html

ESL Listening Exercises: This website offers listening exercises for intermediate and advanced levels in the form of self-grading listening quizzes and mp3 audio downloads.

The listening exercises mainly focus on storytelling and communication, idioms and vocabulary games. Also, the website offers commonly used English Expressions for daily communication and dialogues. In addition, it provides pronunciation exercises that help in the teaching and learning of Standard English pronunciation.

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4 5) http://www.eslflow.com/speakingandcommunicativeicebreakeractivities.html

Dialogues and Conversations: This website provides a tremendous bulk of speaking and icebreaker activities for ESL teachers (multi-level). It provides a lot of exercises on various topics about job interviews, returning an item to a shop, college class schedule, bargaining …etc. The website is very useful for teaching building a conversation and building a cloze dialogue exercise as well. Teachers can use the website to build their quizzes and tests.

6) http://www.esl-lab.com/roots/rootsrd1.htm#list

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab: Esl-lab.com is a website that serves as a listening quiz center. It also provides 20 minutes ESL – vocabulary lessons and long conversations with real video. What characterizes esl-lab.com as a listening quiz center is its listening quizzes section for academic purposes.

7) http://www.ehow.com

How to Improve Good Listening Skills and Communication with Active Listening:

Ehow.com website has a large variety of articles on:

- How to improve listening skills in students

- How to improve good listening skills and communication with active listening - How to be a good listener in class

8) http://www.englishstudydirect.com/OSAC/langacls.htm

Language Activities for listening & Speaking: This website offers listening activities for beginners to advanced - for teachers as well as for students. It also provides business presentation and public speaking in English. The website has a wide range of helpful information and activities for speaking and pronunciation.

http://www.englishclub.com/speaking/index.htm 9)

English Speaking: The English Club website focuses on speaking and emphasizes the importance of speaking practice. It also offers various activities on greetings, telephone English, presentation & public speaking and agreeing and disagreeing. The website is considered a good source of informal contractions, job interviews and making reservations.

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5 10) http://www.englishlistening.com/

It is a comprehensive website. The passages are real people, speaking real English, talking about what interests them. There are passages for everyone: easy passages for beginners, and more difficult passages for advanced students. The English Listening Lounge is a very effective way to learn English.

11) http://www.focusenglish.com/

This site is dedicated to helping ESL/EFL learners develop conversational English skills. At FocusEnglish.com, you can:

 listen to native speakers talk about various topics;

 learn useful idioms;

 learn common words and phrases;

 test your vocabulary skills in everyday English;

 practice responding, in English, to real-life conversations;

 listen to native speakers give sample responses

12) http://www.listen-to-english.com/

The podcasts on this site will help the learners to improve their English vocabulary and pronunciation and their listening skills. There are two short (3 to 5 minutes) podcasts every week, in clearly spoken English. Many of them are linked to grammar and vocabulary notes, or to exercises or quizzes. Learners can download the podcasts to their computers, or subscribe using a programme such as iTunes or Yahoo, or simply listen to them by clicking the Flash player on the web page beneath each episode. The full text of each podcast is on this site, so the learners can look up the meanings of words that they do not understand in a dictionary.

13) http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/

The British Council/BBC website Teaching English is one of the most important English language teaching sites on the web. It brings together lots of things busy teachers need for the classroom and the staffroom – lesson plans and worksheets, teaching tips, web links, teaching articles and lots of information about professional development – training, conferences and qualifications. Teachers can customize their own area on the site to provide personalized content. The site contains interactive and multimedia material including teaching videos, blogs and podcasts, and discussion forums.

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6 14) http://www.international.ouc.bc.ca/

On this website, the learners can practice their listening and speaking skills. There are thirteen units dealing with different things such as tongue twisters, minimal pairs, recording student’s own voice and having a conversation with a native speaker.

15) http://www.speakenglish.co.uk/

On this website, teachers as well as students will find English phrases for use across a wide range of everyday situations. The phrases have been chosen to reflect modern, colloquial English usage. The students will have the chance to listen and repeat.

16) http://www.talkenglish.com/

The website deals with reading, listening, and speaking. At TalkEnglish.com, the lessons are structured to give the learners practice in all three areas at the same time.

TalkEnglish.com developed the "Click, Listen, and Repeat" functionality. In most of the lessons, the learners read the sentence, click on the sentence to listen to the sentence, and then they can practice speaking by repeating after the audio file provided by a native English speaker. This method strengthens their reading, speaking, and listening all at the same time and enables them to speak English fluently.

17) http://www.usalearns.org/

The website helps the learners improve their listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

There are lots of topics and sometimes the learners have access to video segments. It deals with beginning, low-intermediate and intermediate English skills.

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Reading

1) http://www.englishcorner.vacau.com/

This website provides relevant materials for intermediate and advanced students of English as a foreign language. On this site there are topic-related texts and poems about motivating topics like civil rights, nature, great inventions, genetic engineering, etc … .The materials available on this site are followed by motivating activities. Different reading strategies like story building exercises, text reconstruction activities, and gap filling tasks are with great importance. There are also well-designed games used to make the students re-read the text to find solution to riddles.

2) http://www.learninga-z.com/

This website offers many printable materials to teach leveled-reading comprehension, and reading fluency (timed readings to improve speed and comprehension) to achieve such an objective, the site offers reading fluency passages, and reader’s theatre scripts .The teaching materials provided on this website include lesson plans worksheets ,and reading assessments .

3) http://www.manythings.org/e/reading.html

This website is for learners with different English levels. There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, a random-sentence generator and other computer- assisted- language learning activities. Teachers can find interesting materials (texts about different topics: such as health, space, people (biography), sports, American history…). This site provides free printable worksheets that can be given as homework and/or mock exams.

4) http://www.miguelmllop.com/index.php

This site includes texts with different topics devoted to all levels (beginners, intermediate, advanced). It is meant to be a reading practice for different levels of students using a variety of questioning techniques (wh-questions, yes/no questions, true/false statements and multiple choice questions). Teachers can also find on this website vocabulary questions (find synonyms, find words having the same meaning, etc...); games and crossword puzzles which would undoubtedly help students enrich their lexical knowledge in an enjoyable way as part of their practice of reading strategies.

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8 5) http://www.testprepreview.com/modules/reading1.htm

This website entails reading comprehension texts with multiple choice questions. It is a useful site for low and high achievers. It tests the students’ understanding of the texts through practicing different reading techniques and strategies such as reading for gist and details, (skimming /scanning). Each text is followed by questions and answer keys. It can be used for testing as well.

6) http://www.topics-mag.com/

This website deals with reading about different issues enabling ESL students to have a wide range of vocabulary related to various topics of everyday life. One example of these topics is issue 17 where we can find "THINGS WE ENJOY DOING "n°2; we have people talking about things they like doing such as listening to the radio news, playing games, using a computer, etc... This site has free printable worksheets that can be given to the students as additional materials to become more familiar with the topic on focus, and acquire more lexical items to write about a topic related to the unit /chapter main theme.

7) http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/reading/

A reading comprehension website composed of a series of stories with multiple choice questions. Students' understanding of the text is also tested by asking them to recreate the story sentence by sentence and a gap filling exercise to summarize the text.

Students find the stories so funny that they feel motivated to deal with. This website is highly useful for low-intermediate students as those stories are written with simple vocabulary that goes with their level to enhance their acquisition of the newly acquired target language.

Writing

1) http://www.eslflow.com/AcademicWritng.html

Exhaustive exercises on identifying topic sentences, main ideas, and joining sentences to make a paragraph.

2) http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/writing

This is an excellent website for punctuation practice and letter writing.

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9 3) http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/words_list/alle.htm

It has lot of exercises for the practice of letter writing and also for the practice of useful phrases.

4) http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/writing.htm

This site offers general writing techniques and gives lots of tips on different areas of weaknesses on writing.

5) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/7583/grnbefore.html

This site offers ready-made lessons for the practice of 'before', 'after', 'while', and 'when', along with exercises.

6) http://www.pbs.org/readingrainbow/

From the television show, this site has activity suggestions to accompany programs that involve writing and print awareness. Site also includes links to writing contests and samples of children's writing. This can really enrich the reading program if you follow their book lists.

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http://www.nwrel.org/sky/Library/Materials_search/Lesson_Plans/Language_Arts.html This page contains a multitude of resources on one page. Library in the Sky offers links to additional information as well as a list of lesson plans for the internet, creative writing, limericks, ESL lessons, poems, paragraph writing, descriptive writing, and persuasive paragraphs. There are materials for all grades K-12. This one is one of my favorites! Check it out!

8) http://yn.la.ca.us/cec/ceclang/ceclang-elem.html

There are links here to mini-lessons for grade levels K-5 for many different aspects of writing. It includes whole-language experience, vocabulary development, creating books, listening exercises, photo essays, writing auto-biography, spelling, character studies, and grammatical devices. These lessons suit a wide variety of teaching and learning styles and would be useful for almost anyone teaching in an elementary classroom.

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10 9) http://www.metronet.com/~bhorizon/pum.html

This is a site of supplemental activities for thematic units you may do in your classroom on Halloween or pumpkins. Writing skills are approached in fun ways that are linked with other disciplines. Its activities incorporate use of higher order thinking skills and the seven multiple intelligences.

10) http://www.metronet.com/~bhorizon/barn.htm

This site is very similar to the previous listing but the activities are focused on the story, Barn Dance by Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault.

11) http://www.camli.com/english/writing/camli15.html

This is a site which refers you to a resource for teaching the process of composition. It is geared for classrooms with computers at a grade level 7-10.

12) http://www.teachers.net/curriculum/la.html

This is a curriculum bank of lesson plans for language arts. It includes computer based writing lessons, class newspapers, and published books. This is a truly excellent resource for meaningful student-centered activities. I found a great number of useful activities from this page.

13) http://www.bhs.edu/wmc/lessons/endanlplan.html

Not a completely detailed lesson plan, but this is a really good idea for integrating science, language arts, art, and media skills while working on a project on endangered animals. It includes grading rubric for expository writing for the instructor. If the lesson is not useful for you because of materials, resources, etc. there is a really good base idea here for a possible unit. I like the idea a lot.

14) http://magellan.edu/catalog/poetry.html

This site allows teachers or students to enroll in classes from which you can learn about poetry. However, there are some useful ideas which are available to people who are not enrolled. They can be used to teach poetry and its forms, as well as technique.

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11 15) http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/drama.htm

This site has many, MANY links for storytelling, drama, reader’s theater, and puppetry. It has story starters, ideas for writing dramas, and script starters. I feel that this site really has the potential to inspire creativity in the classroom. There are absolutely wonderful ideas for bringing drama into your classroom!

16) http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/itl/index.htm

This is part of Houghton-Mifflin's page of resources for teachers. This section focuses mainly on motivating students to become more confidant and successful readers and writers. The materials linked from this page are geared toward K-6 but could probably be adapted up for most middle school students.

17) http://www.thinkingpublications.com/catalog/eleindex.html

This is another page from which you have to order things to make the best use of the resources, but if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader or download it straight from the web page, you can see free samples that have really excellent ideas for social communication, language, and phonology. I think there are some valuable resources here.

18) http://www.venus.net/~emery2/wise.htm

This page introduces an idea from an elementary school that they call W.I.S.E. The acronym stands for Writing is Sharing Experiences. It is a program you can use with your Writers Workshop. It sounds pretty neat, and if you already have a workshop you are planning on using, it would fit in well. I think that it is a good suggestion.

19) http://www.venus.net/~emery2/writing.html

This is a site that describes the ideal Writers Workshop from the same elementary school as the previous site. There are tips for success in a workshop and suggestions for organization. It follows very closely with the philosophy of Donald Graves. There are also some links to sample writing from some of the children at the elementary school. If you are thinking about starting Writers Workshop in the classroom, this is a good place to look.

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Grammar

1) http://englishforeveryone.org/

English for Everyone: It’s an excellent website which provides everything an ESL teacher or student needs. This site provides exercises and worksheets with answer keys for reading comprehension, sentence completion, analogies, synonyms and antonyms, phonics, alphabetization, writing practice, parts of speech, spellings, paragraph correction, subject and predicates, active and passive voice, verb tenses, punctuation, crossword puzzles, etc. Grade school, General Educational Development (GED), English as a Second Language (ESL) and all interested in advancing their knowledge of the English language should be able to benefit from this website. It offers a large variety of accurate and concise skill building resources geared towards a range of ability levels.

The website's plain display and straightforward navigation structure make it easy for first time users and novice English speakers to understand.

2) http://esl.about.com/

About.Com: This site provides almost everything ESL learners or a teacher needs. It has some wonderful lessons and work sheets for every skill and for every level. Teachers can get full lesson plans and worksheets. Students can use this website to learn English language too. This site also deals with TOEFL, IELTS, and Business English. There are some good English learning tools and Test and quizzes.

3) http://www.esl-galaxy.com/grammarsheets.html

ESL Grammar Exercises: Teachers can use both printable and interactive Grammar Exercises to teach grammar. Some self-study interactive exercises are also suitable for our students. It has a wide range of grammar lessons and worksheets.

4) http://www.tefl.net/about/index.htm

This site teaches British English but also provides help with American English. This site is designed to help ESL teachers be it teaching, learning teaching, or finding teaching jobs.

It has complete lesson plans, and worksheets. It has a wide range of TEFL references and glossary on TEFL sites and TEFL related articles. This site is good for teachers not for students. Teachers can find suggestions, tips and ideas for lessons in a wide range of categories from Business English to Young Learners.

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13 5) http://www.english-to-go.com/english/

This site provides lessons and worksheets in three formats to students and at the same time provides full lesson plans and resources to teachers. This site can be used in class on interactive white board or projector.

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http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?grade=All&keywords=esl+paragraph+writing&rati ng=3&search_type=narrow

This site has writing lesson plans and worksheets. It also provides search on other areas like writing, paragraph, reading, paragraph writing and folktales.

7) http://a4esl.org/

Activities for ESL students: Quizzes, tests, exercises and puzzles to help you learn English as a Second Language (ESL)

This project of The Internet TESL Journal (iteslj.org) has thousands of contributions by many teachers. All the material is categorized into learners’ level of understanding. This site contains Grammar games and activities, grammar quizzes, crossword puzzles, YouTube and podcasts. This site also provides some bilingual material.

8) http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/index.htm

The Study Zone is suitable for students of the English Language Institute. The English- language lessons and practice exercises are created by teachers. While the site is designed to support adult English-language learners, all are welcome to read the lessons and use the exercises. The site is divided into different language levels and provides variety of material especially on Grammar.

9) http://www.rong-chang.com/

This site is good for starters who want to study English through the Web. It deals with all the skills and levels. It has grammar games, dictionaries, encyclopedias, translation, ESP and CALL lessons too.

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14 10) http://www.eslflow.com/Routineslessons.html

ESL FLOW: Exercises and worksheets on all the ESL skills are grouped into levels and categories. This site has material for icebreakers too. This site is equally good for learners and teachers.

11) http://www.usingenglish.com/

This website provides a large collection of ESL tools & resources for both students and teachers. It has a collection of irregular verbs, phrasal verbs and idioms, articles, teacher handouts and printables.

12) http://www.instructorweb.com/resources/grammar.asp

This site includes grammar lesson plans, worksheets, and other teaching material, activities and resources. This site is not good for self-study and for learners.

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Top ESL Websites

Listening: http://www.englishpond.com/listening/index.html

Speaking: http://www.englishclub.com/speaking/index.htm

Reading: http://www.englishcorner.vacau.com/reading/reading.html

Writing: http://www.eslflow.com/AcademicWritng.html

Grammar: http://www.englishforeveryone.org/

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ESL Websites in Alphabetical order

1. www.1-language.com/englishcourse/index.htm

2. www.a4esl.org/q/h/grammar.html

3. www.agendaweb.org/videos/videos-grammar.html

4. www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/

5. www.better-english.com/

6. www.better-english.com/grammar.htm

7. www.bhs.edu/wmc/lessons/endanlplan.html

8. www.camli.com/english/writing/camli15.html

9. www.conversa1.com/grammarseries.htm

10. www.dailygrammar.com/

11. www.edufind.com/

12. www.eduplace.com/rdg/itl/index.htm

13. www.ego4u.com/

14. www.ehow.com

15. www.elllo.org/

16. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_grammar

17. www.english-4kids.com/

18. www.englishchick.com/grammar/

19. www.englishclub.com/

20. www.englishcorner.vacau.com/

21. www.englishforeveryone.org/

22. www.englishgoes.com/grammar.html

23. www.englishgrammar101.com/

24. www.englishgrammarconnection.com/lessonstart.php

25. www.english-grammar-lessons.com/

26. www.english-grammar-revolution.com/english-grammar-lessons.html

27. www.englishgrammarsecrets.com

28. www.englishlearner.com/tests/index.shtml

29. www.englishlistening.com/

30. www.englishmedialab.com/

31. www.englishonline.net/

32. www.englishpage.com/

33. www.englishpage.com/grammar/

34. www.englishpond.com/listening/index.html

35. www.englishstudydirect.com/OSAC/langacls.htm

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17 36. www.english-test.net/lessons/

37. www.english-the-easy-way.com/ - United States

38. www.english-to-go.com/

39. www.english-zone.com/

40. www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/writing.htm

41. www.esl.about.com

42. www.eslcafe.com/grammar.html

43. www.eslfast.com/robot/

44. www.eslflow.com/esllessonplans.html

45. www.esl-galaxy.com/grammarsheets.html

46. www.eslincanada.com/englishlesson2.html

47. www.esl-lab.com/roots/rootsrd1.htm#list

48. www.focusenglish.com/

49. www.free-english-games.com/

50. www.free-english-study.com/

51. www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/7583/grnbefore.htm

52. www.grammarmechanics.com/

53. www.grammar-monster.com/

54. www.grammartips.net/

55. www.instructorweb.com/resources/grammar.asp

56. www.international.ouc.bc.ca/

57. www.learn4good.com

58. www.learnamericanenglishonline.com/.../Blue%20Level.html - United States -

59. www.learnenglish.de/

60. www.learn-english-online.org/

61. www.learn-english-today.com/

62. www.learnerstv.com

63. www.learninga-z.com/

64. www.listen-to-english.com/

65. www.lousywriter.com/

66. www.magellan.edu/catalog/poetry.html

67. www.manythings.org/e/reading.html

68. www.miguelmllop.com/index.php

69. www.myenglishlessons.net/english.htm

70. www.myenglishpages.com/

71. www.myenglishteacher.net/previous.html

72. www.pbs.org/readingrainbow/

73. www.rong-chang.com/grammar.htm

74. www.speakenglish.biz/

75. www.speakenglish.co.uk/

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18 76. www.splashesfromtheriver.com/

77. www.stephenlloydtraining.co.uk

78. www.studyenglishtoday.net/

79. www.talkenglish.com/

80. www.teachers.net/curriculum/la.html

81. www.teachingenglish.org.uk/

82. www.tefl.net/about/index.htm

83. www.testprepreview.com/modules/reading1.htm

84. www.thinkingpublications.com/catalog/eleindex.html

85. www.topics-mag.com/

86. www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/

87. www.usalearns.org/

88. www.usingenglish.com/

89. www.venus.net/~emery2/writing.html

90. web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/330/reading/

91. www.zozanga.com/

Internet Reference Sites

King Abdulaziz University