23 Useful Websites for Teaching and Learning English

September 6, 2014
Below are some valuable resources for ELL and ESL teachers. With these resources, you can find great ways to communicate more effectively, explore lessons, and be a great ELL teacher.

Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon: 

Check out this lexicon that offers images demonstrating the true meaning of the word, making it easier for English language learners to understand.

ManyThings: 

On this website, you’ll find quizzes, word games, puzzles, and a random sentence generator to help students better grasp English as a second language.

bab.la: 

Bab.la is a really fun site for ELL learners, with reference tools like a dictionary and vocabulary, supplemented with quizzes, games, and a community forum.

ESL Basics: 

On this site, you’ll find free English videos for both students and teachers.

English Pronunciation:

 Okanagan College’s resource offers 13 different unit lessons for learning and teaching English pronunciation.

BBC Learning English: 

In this website from the BBC, students can find help with grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, with plenty of references to current events. Plus, you’ll find a special section for ELL teachers.

ESL Gold: 

ESL Gold is, no joke, golden, with seemingly endless learning resources for English. Students can practice pronunciation, find a book to study, and even talk to someone in English on this site. Plus, teachers can find a job, search for textbooks, discover games, and so much more.

Real English:

 Check out this free site for learning English, with loads of videos from real English speakers, plus quizzes and community support.

Repeat After Us: 

In this online library, students can get access to a huge collection of English texts and scripted recordings.

Google Translate: 

An awesome resource to use for simple translations, Google Translate can help your students see how its done and better understand translations between two or more languages.

ESL Cyber Listening Lab:

 Direct your students to this ESL cyber listening lab with study guides, quizzes, and even teacher features.

Vocabulix: 

This online tool is designed to help jumpstart students’ vocabulary skills, with more than 90 vocabulary lessons, and the option to create lessons of your own.

Wordsteps: Wordsteps makes it easy for students to build their own vocabulary collection, and even access their vocabulary through a mobile device for English language learning on the go.

Utah Education Network English Language Learner Resources:

 Check out this list of great resources for ELL, with teaching ideas, forums, and even news and research.

One Stop English:

 Specially designed for English language teachers, One Stop English has a monthly topics series, news lessons, and even an app for on the go ELL teaching.

Casa Notes: 

This ingenious tool allows ELL teachers to effectively communicate with non-English speaking parents. You’ll be able to quickly make and customize notes that you can translate and send home to parents, effectively communicating information about field trips, conduct, homework, and more.

ESL Party Land:

 A great site for ELL teachers, ESL Party Land has lesson plans, strategies, worksheets, flashcards, quizzes, games, and even vocabulary resources to help you be a better ELL teacher.

Clip Art Collection:

 Check out this collection of royalty-free, language-neutral clip art designed to be used for foreign language instruction.

Activities for ESL Students: 

Thousands of teacher contributions can be found on this site full of quizzes, exercises, and tests for teaching English as a second language.

Szoter: 

Using this online annotation tool, ELL teachers can write directly on images to explain their meaning to students.

Oxford University Press Learning Resources Bank: 

A service of Oxford University Press, this learning resources bank for English language teaching has courses, titles, and interactive English reading tools.

English-Test.net:

 Encourage students to self-test with this website, offering free English tests, grammar exercises, and worksheets.

EduFind English Online Tests and Learning Games: 

Check out these test and games that offer a great way for students to test and improve their English language skills.

Adapted from 50 Incredibly Useful Links for ELL Educators.

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Wlingua, A Cool App for English Language Learners and Teachers

July 12, 2014
Wlingua is a good language learning app that  aims to give your students the chance to improve their English skills outside the classroom. They can learn many things watching TV shows or reading books, newspapers... Although these are undoubtedly valuable tools, there is no possible way for you to monitor their progress following your guidance. 

Wlingua allows you to

• Keep tabs on your students’performance. 
• Find quality lessons to complement your own lessons
• From a basic to an intermediate level. Choose where you want to start and Wlingua will help you learn English at your own pace.
• Learn English through the 600 lessons created by our team of teachers.
• Learners who don’t have enough time to learn English could join a quality course anytime anywhere. 

App's strong points: 

● More content than anybody else (600 lessons divided in 4 levels, from  A1 to B2). Besides, the learner can choose between British and American English. The app gives learners reports of their performance and it has plenty ofdifferent exercises which can help them improve in every skill: reading, listening, grammar, vocabulary, speaking, pronunciation...
● Learners can download the lessons in PDF.
● You can learn English from Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German and French.

Wlingua is a multi platform app, which can be accessed from any device (Smartphone, iPad, iPhone, PC, Mac, Tablet...). The Premium account is free for the first month, then you can choose to buy 1, 3, 6 or 12 months subscription. In case you don't want to pay, the account goes Basic. You can continue learning but with some restrictions since not all features are available with the Basic account.

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Excellent Web Tools to Help Students Learn English Pronunciation

May 19, 2014
English language is a stressed language (I mean stress in linguistic terms) and as such it poses some daunting challenges to learners particularly EFL learners. I speak four languages and I have been teaching English to EFL students for several years and I know exactly the hardships students encounter when learning English pronunciation. Unlike other languages, mal-pronunciation in English can result in a completely different meaning than the intended one. Some examples of the problematic words EFL learners have issues with include : fear/fair, tank/thank, read (present tense)/ read(past tense), got/gut.

As a teacher, you definitely can not model the pronunciation of every single word for your students and this is where the importance of web tool such as the ones below is highlighted. Anytime students come across a new word they haven't seen before, they can check its pronunciation using these tools. In this way they can be sure of how to say it right.

1- Howjsay

This is a great free online talking dictionary of English pronunciation. Just type in your word and Howjsay provides the pronunciation together with other variations of the word.

2- Wordhippo

This is another great free online dictionary that allows students to check for pronunciation of words. To use Wordhippo, type in your word, and select pronounce from the options. Students can also use it to  look for synonyms, antonyms, word meanings, and many more.

3- Macmillan Dictionary

The popular Macmillan dictionary has an option where users can listen to the pronunciation of the word looked for. Under each word you look for in Macmillan, a pronunciation button is provided that you can click on to hear how the word is pronounced.

4- Dictionarist

Dictionarist is similar to Macmillan. It provides both word meaning and its pronunciation. It also shows the word translation in different languages.

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