NAU CALL

This is a great site for borrowing ideas that could help develop and supplement lessons. From the site: "These lessons are designed for adult ESL students at the intermediate and advanced levels. Students learn new vocabulary, and practice using it by looking at and describing portraits, landscapes, and narrative works of art."

Subtitles could help enhance popular shows for language learners. Most of the shows on the PBS website had subtitles, but when I pushed pause the words disappeared. ELLs would have a difficult time checking their spelling and reading at fast speeds. PBS could be a good tool for advanced language learners.

Hello, This another website. It gives you and your students and opportunity to find interesting materials. It covers the different skills fo the Engtlish language. Nour

Hello CALLers, Here is avery interesting website. It offers a number of interesting activities depending on the topic that you want to foucs on. It is a very good source for an ESP class

This website is an extensive list of idioms in English, organized by letter they begin with. At the bottom of each page, there's a quiz. Although the quizzes are pretty basic, I find that this website is a good resource because there are many activities that can be based on the content found here.

This website has many games for grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, as well as games that teachers can use to get all classmates involved at once (e.g., Jeopardy). The games are meant to be supplementary. Some disadvantages to the website are that the pronunciation exercises require that students be familiar with the IPA, that the exercises are largely drills, and that there are many ads on the website that could be distracting. However, if students need additional practice with a specific grammatical, vocabulary, or pronunciation item, then this website could be useful.

This website is great for reading material. It's a compilation of original poetry and fiction (ranging from flash fiction to short stories to novels). There is also an essay section. Because much of it is unedited, you might need to read through a few to find good quality, but if you're teaching reading/writing, this could be a good resource to have students look at different pieces and compare them. There's also an option to review pieces, so there can be some level of interaction. Do note, however, that content is rated for maturity by the authors, so that can vary.

This is my favorite online dictionary for L2 purposes. It contains several translation dictionaries between English and Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and several other languages. It also has conjugation charts (when you look up words), translations for phrases, and forums. The website also has plenty of examples. I have used this website for years when working in Spanish, and I have found the forums particularly useful when trying to translate something tricky. Also, when searching for a multi-word phrase, I recommend using quotation marks.

Some reminders and tips for teaching children.

It is a website mainly for British English, but students can develop their listening skills as they navigate through the website. They have options of discovering more about cultural landmarks, etiquette for boys, and pretend lectures. This is a nice website for students that wish to improve their listening skills and desire to learn more about British culture.

This site offers on-line instruction for ESL students moving into academic writing. Most of the information is free, but you can also take an on-line class and get feedback from the teacher/website owner. There are quizzes and examples for self-instruction. From the site: "This web site is for non-native speakers of English who want to write in English for academic purposes. The material in this site is aimed toward high intermediate or advanced English learners who have never taken a formal English writing course and whose TOEFL score is about 500 or more. The main objective of this site is to help non-native English speakers write for an English speaking academic audience which necessarily includes organization of ideas, the single greatest weakness among many non-native English speakers."

more CBI resources

online resources for CBI

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.

Virtual tourist allows you to plan trips all over the world. DuBravac chapter 5 discusses consensus activities on pages 92-93 and lists a trip-planning task as one example. After choosing a continent, learners could choose a particular country (or, the teacher could assign each group a country), and then the site offers pictures, pros and cons of traveling in this country, lists of attractions, reviews of hotels and restaurants, etc... The interactive maps, pictures, videos, and comments/reviews from other users make this site pretty engaging. I could see it being a bit overwhelming for some learners, though, since there is so much information. But if a teacher wants to use one website for a trip-planning task, this one looks good!

Found this interesting blog post about how you can pretty easily use corpora to validate claims about idiom frequency. I think this could be a useful technique for evaluating certain kinds of textbooks as well as selecting fixed expressions for your own teaching content/materials.

This is a very intersting website. It is very interactive. Students can be asked/ encouraged to visit this website to gain more practice with the Eng;sih grammar. It can also help teachers with ideas on how to design effective grammar activities

This website is an interactive guide to the sounds of American English, German, and Spanish. It's American English guide is comprehensive, including a step by step guide on how to produce each sound. In addition, flash animation is used to demonstrate how to position one's mouth in order to produce the sounds of American English. This tool is useful for students who are curious about pronunciation or who are struggling with a particular sound that they would like to improve. Although the technical terms are defined, this tool can still be confusing for students and should not be taken as a guaranteed solution for improving pronunciation. It can, however, be used as supplementary material.

When you click the American English option, you can select consonants' manner, place, voice, or the vowels' monopthongs and diphthongs. Then, you can see an animation of the sound, or you can see a person using the sound in a word. The home page says it has libraries of the phonetic sounds of English, German, and Spanish.

I opened the Pizza Restaurant "Community" topic. Part 1 is a Listening (using an optional audio segment), and read along section. I didn't see an option for speed and I found the reading to be fast for a language learner, but they can repeat it for multiple readings. Part II is a discussion with a couple of questions, "What kind of pizza do you like and what toppings do you like on it? And "Are there any unique toppings that people put on pizza in your country that reflect your local foods?" Part III is an online investigation with a link to a practice. From their Website: "One of the best ways to improve communication skills is to become familiar with the language by reading, building vocabulary, and discussing what you study in daily conversations. Too often, ESL/EFL students spend time reading about topics that they normally wouldn't use in daily conversation. This site presents short conversation starters or readings that you can study and then try to apply in everyday situations Before anything else, be sure to read the page, Using This Site, to understand the purpose of these materials and how to best use them. The table below outlines current and future topics. Those with links are now available. Write me if you have an idea for a new reading topic."

When I opened a lesson on grammar, it had a lesson with a Q & A section below it where students can check their own answers. A daily vocab word is also on the page. Lessons include grammar, reading, vocab, listening, pronunciation, slang/idioms. From the Website: "Learning English as a second language (ESL) is not always easy, but it should be fun. 5 Minute English has been designed to give you short and easy explanations and exercises. You can also find answers to questions that other students have had about confusing things in English. This is under the Question and Answer section. Take your time and come back to 5 Minute English often. You'll be surprised at how much English you can learn with a little dedication."