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Database of freely available interactive online exercises for studying English grammar. Can search for grammar activities by grammar point, difficulty level or activity type. Useful for ESL/EFL study as well as for native speaking writing students. Can sign up for free log in to track your use, or just use the VGL without signing in.

May 28 - 30, 2009 at The George Washington University, Washington, DC Designed for practitioners and researchers involved in the preparation and ongoing professional development of language teachers, LTE 2009 will address the education of teachers of all languages, at all instructional and institutional levels, and in many national and international contexts in which this takes place including: English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) instruction; foreign/modern/world language teaching; bilingual education; immersion education; indigenous and minority language education; and the teaching of less commonly taught languages.

The International Corpus of Learner English (Version 2) is a corpus of writing by higher intermediate to advanced learners of English. It contains 3.7 million words of EFL writing from learners representing 16 different mother tongue backgrounds (Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Tswana). It differs from the first version published in 2002 not only by its increased size and range of learner populations, but also by its interface, which contains two new functionalities: built-in concordancer allowing users to search for word forms, lemmas and/or part-of-speech tags and breakdown of the query results according to the learner profile information.

Links to a video of a teacher training session on Web 2.0 Tools and a 53-page booklet with suggestions and step-by-step instructions for using them.

The dizzy speed of technological development has driven the educational market to pile up a huge number of software programs without any serious methodological concern and consideration of the application to a variety of learners. This paper reviews current software evaluation tools and their problems, followed by further specific discussion of issues related to language learning software programs. Based on the critique of dominant bottom-up approaches of current software evaluation, this paper tries to take a holistic methodological framework into serious consideration and to provide a tentative framework which addresses key areas in evaluating language learning software programs for educators and learners.