This website has a large collection of audio stories for ESL students. While the rate of speech appears to be slow, the vocabulary does not seem appropriate for lower-proficiency learners. For intermediate and higher learners, the site might be applicable for classroom activities and/or extensive listening.

I love this website. Here's why: to use many online resources, you have to provide an email address. And then you have to check your email to validate that you gave the company a real email address. If you are a teacher, simply looking at resources and you don't feel like submitting your re email address, just use 10 Minute Mail. I used it today to sign up for Grockit and Socrative. The website gives you an email address that lasts for 10 minutes. If you have to wait for another website to email you, just wait for the email to show up. (The page autorefreshes, I believe.) Then you're all set.

I don't think this resource has been posted yet. It's a website with simple news stories for English language learners. Each news story has a recorded version that learners can listen to and a transcript for them to read. The transcripts have glosses for difficult words as well. Overall, it looks like a good resource for in or out of class reading or listening activities.

Eview.net is a site for ESL teachers that could be helpful in a listening and speaking class. The site has stream-able mp3s of interviews with speakers who have various English accents. Each exercise comes with a gloss and comprehension questions as well. This might be a good way to emphasize English as a global language.

Bek sent out this link that explains why Ells should use learner dictionaries rather than dictionaries written for native speakers. The presentation could be incorporated into a high-intermediate listening and speaking class.

I read about WebCorp in Dubravac's chapter 3, and it is definitely worth checking out. You search for words or phrases, and the website pulls up concordance lines (key word(s) in context) for the words as they are found on webpages. The search results also include links to these websites.

Hi, unfortunately, this Google lab seems to be defunct, at least at the moment. However, it really has some great potential for ESL teaching. Essentially, the idea was for Google to go through some of its videos about politics and transcribe the text. Then, someone looking for a video with specific content, phrases, or words could search through the videos without having to rely on the way in which the video was tagged or its title. It's almost like corpus linguistics meets Youtube. You could pick a word or phrase and show a lot of clips about how "real" speakers use it.

Let's say you end up teaching EFL where you have access to the internet but no online academic site like BlackBoard to use for grading. Or, maybe you just don't like BlackBoard all that much. Engrade is an incredibly useful website in that it serves as an online gradebook for tracking academic performance and attendance. I found out about the site from a fellow GA at NAU whose department had decided that Engrade was simply easier to use than BlackBoard. While you can't upload all the content--readings and such--as you can on BlackBoard, at least as far as I can tell, Engrade does allow you to upload rubrics and word lists for flash cards. It also has a system for warning students similar to the GPS system at NAU. Yet another great feature is that if you're ever required to turn in hard copies of your gradebook or your attendance, you can easily export that information. Engrade is also FERPA compliant for those of you teaching in the US. I used it at NAU last semester, and it worked like a charm. I can't recommend it enough.

English-Guide.org is an incredible website, albeit it looks like it is designed for children. That said, if you're teaching children English learners, great; you're all set to go. If you're teaching adults, this site could be used as a respite from the intensity of intensive English programs. While many of the resources on the site are language learning games that take the form of drill-and-kill exercises, not all of the material is so rudimentary. For instance, the Career/Business section under Listening links to many listening passages at elllo.org (another useful site for listening and speaking teachers). On elllo, learners can listen to business passages, such as one on personality traits and answer comprehension questions. It would be tempting to let a class full of learners loose on this site to see what resources they would gravitate toward. The major categories of resources Vocabulary, Listening, Grammar, and Others, and within these categories, like I mentioned, there are both games and more sophisticated exercises at the learners' fingertips.

EngVid is a collection of short English lessons posted as videos. Learners watch the videos on particular topics instructing them how to use the English language correctly. Each video is marked for certain proficiency levels. Additionally, the site features about seven consistent teachers. For learners who enjoy the style of a particular teacher, the learner can explore other lessons taught by that teacher. Because the English lesson is in a video form, learners can move the cursor back and forth to have content repeated. And because the topic of the video is at the learner's discretion, the learner may feel like he/she is getting individualized instruction that is not always available in larger classroom settings. The most beneficial aspect of the site are the quizzes that learners can take after viewing each lesson. These lessons ask students to apply the information presented in the videos. That is, instead of being comprehension questions about the lecture, the learners must use the particular language features being discussed.

English Daily is an interesting site for English learners because of its vast array of resources. For learners who have an interest in learning about English idioms, learners can discover the definitions of idioms and read examples of them in context. To learn about English language culture or for practicing reading fluency aloud, the Movie Lines section of the site contains portions of dialogue from popular movies. To practice comprehension questions, the comprehension section allows learners to read a passage and to answer questions about it. While the website has many advantages and may appeal to younger learners and business professionals alike, the presentation of the content is not very aesthetically pleasing, and the site is full of advertisements that may distract learners from the content they are attempting to learn. Additionally, the site is not very interactive beyond the news section that allows learner to listen to a news story and to complete cloze exercises. Furthermore, the answers to exercises are presented on the same page as the exercises themselves, so clearly a learner would need to be rather autonomous to use the site effectively. To fully incorporate the site into a classroom, a teacher would benefit from creating supplemental materials such as a learning log in order to track student learning.

ESL Video is a website that pairs authentic videos with comprehension questions. The user selects a video at a particular level and about a particular topic, views the video, and answers questions about what was said in the video. While such a resource could be used in a listening and speaking class, some, or at least one, of the videos could be used in a class focused on reading. To explain, the video only had music for the soundtrack while simple text appeared on the screen for the viewer to read. Of note is that many of the videos feature popular culture, so conceivably these videos would contribute both to language learning and to learning about the culture of English speaking countries. One interesting video features Jimmy Fallon, the Roots, and Carly Rae Jepson playing "Call Me Maybe," and the related quiz asks learners to fill in the blanks in lines of lyrics. Also, teachers are able to create their own quizzes for the website.

Eslpod is a site replete with listening passages for English language students on a variety of subjects. Where eslpod differs from sites such as Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab is that following the listening passage portion of the podcast is an explanation of the vocabulary included in the passage and what the speakers meant in certain portions. This site has the potential to be incorporated into a listening and speaking class in that the explanation portion of the podcast serves as a lecture of sorts. Students might benefit most if required to complete a listening guide while listening to the passage. Eslpod may in fact offer such resources, yet they are unavailable without a membership. Regardless, the podcasts are free to listen to, are clearly articulated, and delivered at a rate to benefit English language students.

My English Lab by Pearson is a supplemental site to the North Star Listening and Speaking and Reading and Writing textbooks. With an access code provided in textbooks, students can access a class website. Similar to BlackBoard Learn, My English Lab provides students with a calendar for assignments and enables teachers to upload content. More than that, My English Lab has many related and supplemental resources pertaining to each unit in the corresponding textbooks. For example, when covering unit one in NorthStar 3 about Advertising on the Air, My English Lab gives students access to all of the recordings from the unit that a teacher might use in class. It also gives students flash card decks with the vocabulary for the unit and sometimes has extra exercises for the students to complete. Depending on the exercises, My English Lab will score these exercises to give students grades. The disadvantages of the site primarily relate to logistics. When students by used copies of their textbooks, the books might be missing the access code. Also, students must have access to computers to make use of the site outside of class time.

Voxopop is a social network based on talk groups. Talk groups can be set up by a teacher, and the teacher can invite students to join. Within a talk group, the teacher can set up strands based on an assignment. For instance, a prompt (an initial recording post) might ask the students to record five sentences using the present progressive tense. Students would then record themselves providing these sentences. Some of the major advantages of Voxopop include the ability for students to listen to the audio posts by other students in the class. Also, whereas using phones with Google Voice require students to respond to a listening prompt immediately (in real time), Voxopop allows students to listen to a prompt, prepare their answers, and then record. In this way, the site may be beneficial for students in lower levels. One of the major disadvantages of Voxopop is that it can be a taxing process to get every student in a class signed up. Additionally, students must have access to computers with microphones to complete tasks outside of class. Moreover, rumor has is that Voxopop has a history of being "down" and therefore is unreliable.

Eyercize has significant potential in high-intermediate and high level language learning classrooms. The premise is fairly simple. The site allows users to paste text into a text box. From there, the users can learn to read faster in that the site will sequentially highlight groups of words at a time. The site allows the user to adjust how many words are highlighted and at what speed the highlighting occurs. Teaching language learners and readers of all types to read in such a matter is important in that advanced readers do not read one letter or word at a time, for the most part. Advanced readers take in groups of words and quickly progress through a passage. Eyercize can help learners learn this ability.

Google voice is a resource that can potentially be used in listening and speaking classes. Essentially, it allows the user to associate a phone number with one's Google account. From there, the user can record messages that the caller will hear when he/she dials the phone number. In a Listening and Speaking context, access to recorders for classroom use may be limited at times. However, many learners have cell phones. To complete a listening and speaking task, during class or for homework, learners can call the phone number, listen to the task, and record their responses. Many concerns with Google Voice arise, however. Most notably, the quality of the recording may be muddy. That is, learners may have a difficult time comprehending the recorded message they hear when initially calling. Additionally, the messages recorded by the learners can be difficult for the instructor to understand. Also, whereas recorders allow learners to confirm that their speech has been recorded, on Google Voice, the learners simply hang up and receive no such confirmation--unless the task is done in a classroom setting whereupon the instructor has the list of messages available. Moreover, the learners are not able to listen to their messages or the messages of other students in the class if they are not logged into the instructor's account. As far as the positive attributes, Google Voice attempts to transcribe messages, and while the transcriptions are not always accurate, even when transcribing messages from native speakers of English, the transcriptions are interesting to read nonetheless. Possibly giving learners an incentive such as extra credit for a perfect transcription due to their pronunciation is an option. Additionally, Google Voice does allow the instructor to download the messages if desired, so saving the files is possible. As far as identifying the callers, each voice message is accompanied by the phone number, so collecting students' phone numbers is probably