Three Free Exceptional ESL and EFL Resources for English Students, Teachers, Tutors
Learning English, on your own and according to your own wishes and needs, has never been easier. Everyone with internet access can become autotelic, or self-directed, in creating their own educational program. Naturally, innovative ESL educators and EFL schools have embraced these possibilities to enrich their English classrooms.
The endless web continually offers pleasant surprises. This weekend I found new more exceptional free websites for English teachers, tutors, and students: USA Learns, BBC Learning English, and YapPR. I strongly recommend you explore them.
USA Learns – www.usalearns.org This U.S. Department of Education website for adult immigrants and future American citizens combines video lessons and clear written ESL materials. Launched in November 2008, this site has rapidly developed an international audience of English language learners worldwide.
BBC Learning English http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/ An outstanding website with audio, transcripts, and sometimes video of the world news written for English language learners. This excellent resource works for English students, ESL teachers, and EFL tutors.
YapPR – www.en.yappr.com – This innovative public relations site highlights short music videos, amusing commercials, and AP news stories with English transcriptions for English language learners. An accessible, clean videosharing site designed for ESL/EFL students. Does the public relations element bother me? Not really. The transcription feature provides valuable information for students which outweighs the apparent “pay to play” selection bias.
This is the best time – so far – to study and teach English. Never before have we had so many resources available – often for free -to explore and experiment with new technologies.
And tomorrow will be even better!
Ask more. Know more. Share more.
Create Compelling Conversations.
Visit www.CompellingConversations.com
I recently found another great site for those of you who are learning English and have moved on to reading. English literature can be extremely daunting for many and Shmoop has some excellent literature study guides translated to Spanish Literatura that come in very useful. The site approaches all the famous novels, plays and poems with simple language and easy to understand explanations of themes, techniques used, and characters. It also provides teachers of English literature with teaching tools and students help with essay writing and guidance in fleshing out their ideas. Worth a look at I think.
Excellent tip! I will check that site out.
Perhaps students learning English and Spanish will both benefit from that lead.
You can also search for captioned videos with highlighted English phrases here: http://www.22frames.com/
There are lots of videos in their index spanning various subjects. The project description has more: http://www.22frames.com/esl.aspx
That’s a solid, apparently rapidly expanding website with an extensive library of ESL videos, including a collection of video clips highlighting the importance of clear pronunciation and the problems from misunderstanding a conversation partner.
Although I appreciate the great humor often caused by these misunderstandings caused by poor pronunciation, I personally stay away from using humorous videos due to student sensitivities. Still, thank you for sharing that site.
We all must have heard the saying “Charity Begins at Home”. So does with all the things in life, whether big or small, it always starts from ones home. Learning and improving upon English
is no different at all. It stems from where one calls his or her home.
In the modern times with the advent of internet and advancement in technology, learning a new trade or a skill has become easier and convenient. Gone are the days when one had to travel for miles to attain a dance class or may be a music session. These days one can easily use the internet and learn with the help of the so many websites that would teach one such skill’s for free or for a very nominal fee. The same goes with English too, one can use the internet to find about whatever they want to know about the language. They can use the online dictionary for vocabulary, take online English lessons sitting right at home, hear word pronunciations, listen to English music to get used to the rhythm and flow of the language, watch movies, read books and do so many other things related to improvement in the language.