All ESOL/ESOL Resources:
4 Skills, Newspapers around the world, Vocabulary Development, and many other relevant resources
Reading Resources:
use intermediate and advanced links from the University of Victoria, with readings, narrations and multiple choice exercises
LEARNING VOCABULARY
Vocabulary Activities
ESL at About offers stories on current topics, articles, ideas for vocabulary practice, and some vocabulary games.
Beginning of Class “Ice Breakers” Using Vocabulary
Though many of these activities are for K-12, some may be fun to use for 5 minutes (in the classroom), at the beginning of class, or as a “short break” routine during 3 credit-hour classes. Or, they can just be inspirational items for teachers to adjust for a college language classroom.
Vocabulary Practice
UsingEnglish offers grammar activities for both ESL and native speakers, BUT geared towards K-8th grade. The links on testing and dictionary use are very useful. Students can do activities at home, in the language lab or in class. The instructor can opt to check items or use these items on the website for testing or quizzes.
WRITING/COMPOSING
General Writing (composition/basic essay)
- ChompChomp – General (more native speaker) grammar activities, fun-oriented, friendly language. Faculty should try out activities before assigning to students. Go to Tips and Rules. They are pretty good and easy to use. There are handouts and power-point resources.
- Grammar-Quizzes is also primarily geared towards native speakers, but it has some good links. The one I recommend the most is link called “connectors.” It can help students with sentence writing such as subordination, coordination and transitionals. However, teachers may need to teach and mitigate these handouts as they are not fully designed for independent study. The site is good for paragraph coherence and sentence structure.
ESL Activities
- A4ESL – ESL/Bilingual (many languages); has traditional ESL activities (Easy, Medium, High level of difficulty)
- Grammar/Mixed Exercises on A4ESL deal with places, idioms, vocabulary, homonyms, etc.
- ESL: Cultural notes/Holidays/Trivia
- In the academic writing section of ESLFlow.com, there is a variety of resources ranging from graphic organizers to pre-writing ideas to worksheets on how to write essay outlines as well as a variety of worksheets to help make student writing more dynamic. There are also a number of activities to help improve students’ work on the sentential and paragraph level. This particular site is a better resource for teachers, as the worksheets and resources can serve as supplements to teachers’ lessons on process writing. For more resources targeted specifically at writing argumentative/opinion essays, compare and contrast essays, descriptive essays, compare and contrast, and narrative essays please see the following to strands of the website: Argumentative Essay, Cause and Effect, Descriptive Writing, Comparison and Contrast, Narrative Essay.
Short Story
