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It all started over a decade ago when a group of American and British ESL teachers at the Marzio School in the south of France noticed that the traditional materials they were using from The Big Publishers to teach their students simply weren't doing the job they were supposedly designed for. Classroom English is all too often "perfect" with slow short phrases spoken on the audio and video materials used with students. This is fine until the learners actually meet genuine Americans, British people, and other Anglo-Saxons, to discover that nobody, in the real world, speaks "classroom English". The idea was to take the shock out of hearing real English for the first time. Since our students now watch and listen to real people, the shock is built into the method itself, saving learners many hours of frustration during their first weeks and months in new English-speaking environments.

"So, if you want to understand English fast and learn fast, read one article or more a day. You can improve your reading and listening fast. We are trying to do everything possible to help you learn English fast and understand it. That's why we prepare easy English news for you. When you use this website every day, you can learn 5000 words which you need for communication with anybody."

This is a great resource for EFL teachers.  The site has the recent news articles delivered in three different levels based on learner ability. The site can be used for additional practice for EFL students or as homework

"WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. We especially hope that this tool is helpful in supporting English Language Learners. We want WordSift to be a useful tool, but we also want it to be fun and visually pleasing. We would be happy if you think of it playfully - as a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and explore the richness and wonders of language!"

Paul Nation's test for assessing the vocabulary size of learners

captioned videos for EFL learners

Member Stein's resource sharing website geared for younger learners. http://eflclassroom.com/profile/stein

Lots of resources, crafts for young learners.

Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas

Please promote on your websites so we can have an active chat site. Embed even on your page!

English learners , teachers and any English speakers can chat on any topic and make the world that much smaller by sharing the English language and interests.

Mary Ann Zehr is an assistant editor at Education Week. She has written about the schooling of English-language learners for more than seven years and understands through her own experience of studying Spanish that it takes a long time to learn another language well. Her blog will tackle difficult policy questions, explore learning innovations, and share stories about different cultural groups on her beat.

Headway elt books have been helping English language learners for decades. Now, they have joined the 21st century with Headway iTools for smartboards to compliment your lessons.

A review of New Headway iTools for smartboards or projectors to bring your English classroom to life!

nternational Express Elementary consists of a Teacher Resource Book, a Student Book with Pocket Book and cassette, and finally a Student Workbook and cassette. Therefore there is a lot of material and information contained in this package, and makes a valuable contribution to elementary level education for adult learners who are trying to keep pace with modern communication methods.

International Express - A book review.

http://eflclassroom.ning.com EFL Classroom 2.0 is an international community of educators and learners discovering better ways to teach and learn the wonderful language of English.

Non-native English learners are often amused, intrigued, and confused by the use of compound words in English. Oddly, in English, there are three forms of compound words: closed form (notebook), hyphenated form (mother-in-law), and open form (real estate).