Group items tagged

"Improve Reading Speed and Comprehension Spreeder.com is free online speed reading software designed to improve your reading speed and comprehension. Spreeder is a free service provided by 7-Speed-ReadingTM. If you like this site, please have a look at our powerful 7 Speed Reading Software." This looks like an amazing tool-- You can paste in your own text and it will pop up in a timer box. When you click the Speeder button it will tell you how long it took to read the passage. But no comprehension questions!

A great example of a clearly defined lesson in guided reading and thinking in an historical context (Ghandi v. Ho Chi Minh as protest leaders). Ms. Duvoor models how to think like a historian as you read original documents.

"Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can: * Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go, * Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer, * View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen, * Print out the stories and poems to make your own book." You can save to desktop and so free your class of Internet requirements or read and listen on the Web. You can browse alphabetically by author, title, subject matter, or by Reading Level.

This article has a thorough discussion of the reading-writing connections for ESL primary school, and includes a nice reading response worksheet in the appendix. Article by Annmarie Jackson, GSU.

An online speed reading training tool, this site really helps you improve reading speed. Contains a very limited library for practice, but you can also highlight text in a browser and open the Eyercize tool from an icon on your browser toolbar. Should be quite useful. R. Stannard has a training video on how to use this tool /eyer/index.html>

This brief article by Tom Robb outlines a great new Moodle application that is free if your school already uses Moodle, or accessible online where you can have your own page for quiz access. The add-on offers a short quiz of 10 randomized questions for almost 2,000 commonly read books used for extensive reading programs with the major graded reader series. See the http://MoodleReader.org site.

Lots of bookis read aloud. with text before your eyes. Being read to is a good way to get a sense of the language. Recommended by Russell Stannard at http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/10jan/index.html.

Online books for kids, read by children, with illustrations and all. Very nice read along. Many free, and can be personalized with your children's names.

This video shows how to use Feed Marklet to create a button on your browser toolbar to add an RSS feed. Takes about 1 minute. You can use an RSS feed to keep track of student Webpages, and have them use it to keep track of each other's work. For instance, they might add all the pages they are making, or their blogs, and so be able to read them quickly when new content is added.

"City College of San Francisco ESL students explore the Living Roof at the California Academy of Sciences with its 1.7 million native plants and exciting green technology which controls the building's temperature. Instructor: Cora Chen (visit Cora's ESL Page)" This is a nice example of how a day-trip can be combined into a media and reading-writing project for adult students.

This is an amazing resource for teaching high school/adult ed. It is video-based and free--individual students can sign in, or a teacher can register a whole class and keep records of their activities. There is an excellent explanatory video for teachers also. Lots of listening/speaking/reading practice.

This site is commercial, but it has lots of interesting ideas on ways the readers theater can help students with reading, listening, and speaking.

"Many people don't realize that The New York Times can be quite accessible for English Language Learners. Due to its focus on current events and news, using The Times to learn vocabulary and practice reading can be much more inviting and rewarding than a textbook. And NYTimes.com has some extra tools and features that are particularly useful for language learning. Here are 10 ideas for using The Times to teach and learn the English language." Includes lookup dictionary, multimedia archive, K/W/L Chart, short activities, culture experiences, lesson plans, this day in history, etc.

very good material by Cambridge reading and listening comprehension

very good material by Cambridge reading and listening comprehension

Put in a Web address and lingro turns all the words into clickable links to a dictionary. You can hear the word read out. Further it remembers the words and lets you review and study them. So far 11 languages, including Dutch and Chinese. A fabulous tool for students--better than a dictionary. See Russell Stannard's training video at

A huge list of materials online related to listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and general study skills. Teachers need to review and select from sites to use them effectively in an academic program. Prepared by Christine Bauer-Ramazani for her Academic Skills courses.

100s of guides to learning and studying in dozens of languages. Especially good for writing, reading, and critical thinking skills. Also has some materials for students with learning disabilities, e.g., ADHD. Mainly native-speaker oriented.

Vocabulary exercises at many different levels with lots pre-reading (sentence-level), and then exercises with cartoons and sounds for help. Highly interactiv--point and click on an item, drag-and-drop an item to a cartoon figure, listening to the item and type, etc. Despite cartoon/movie figures, adults could use these exercises, too (from Russel Stannard, TeachertrainingVideos.com).

This is an incredibly useful resource for language classes. In combination with news syndicates like ABC, Fox, AP, and AFP, Mapeas collects video news and locates it on a Google map. Students learn geography, read news in English or an FL, and can specify business, entertainment, science news, etc.

Children create their own commic strip using characters provided from database. Not specifically for ESL/EFL, but is a nice writing activity, and can be in any of several European languages. William Zimmerman has created a page with his handouts from a workshop, "Creating Comic Strips Online to Encourage Writing, Reading and Storytelling," at the TESOL Denver 2009 conference, at http://www.makebeli efscomix. com/How-to- Play/Educators --EHS