
Kim Oliver ESOL Web Links
Tech up your teaching! Every good teacher knows that the resources outside the classroom are as important as those inside for students to improve their mastery of the English language! The internet is now a gold mine of resources, but some are more helpful than others! So I have created a page with the best of the best web resources available for ESL teachers and students.
Beginning Levels:
Janis' ESL HomePage
http://www.issbc.org/janis-esl/links.html
This is a great site for very low levels. The site is organized by topics, such as "Jobs" or "Clothing". When you click on each topic, you are taken to about twenty more links, some of which are vocabulary review/pronunciation sites, some are vocab. quizzes, and a few are listening. It is quite good for having students review vocabulary covered in class.
ESL Flash Cards
There are tons of basic vocabulary and holiday flashcards that are free to print. Great for beginner vocabulary and grammar games.
Language guide
http://www.languageguide.org/english/
This is a beginner visual vocabulary guide. You choose the topic (i.e. fruits), and picturers pop up. You listen to the pronunciation as you roll over the word. Great for beginners.
Henry Resource page
http://www.michellehenry.fr/voc.htm
This site is out of France, but has the most wonderful set of links arranged alphabetically by topic. Each topic has links from a wide variety of sources from powerpoints to videos to handouts.
More Advanced Levels:
Academic Word List
http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com/
If you are familiar with the 1000 most common academic word list, then you'll appreciate this site which breaks it down into 10 sublists, each with 6 groups and three online quizzes or each group. Very helpful with advanced reading and vocabulary classes.
Visuwords
This is a very different kind of dictionary; it is online and graphical, showing words with similar roots and their parts of speech. It is better for advanced Students.
Forming different parts of speech from word bases
http://esl.about.com/od/vocabularyadvanced/a/a_wordforms1.htm
Extensive advanced chart with concept nouns, personal nouns, verbs and adjectives
Vocab Sushi
This is a fantastic advanced site, which helps students prepare standardized test by teaching vocab words with real-world, contextual examples found in the daily news. Real sentences from the news teach context along with definitions. With registration, there is a diagnostic; afterwards the program only gives them words that will challenge them, and skips the ones they might already know. And as the student learns, the program tracks the progress overall and for every word. When the student learns words, they're automatically replaced with newer, more challenging ones. It has quizzes, MP3 pronunciation tracks and continually updated news articles containing the target vocabulary. Update: The site is no longer free!
Vocabulary.com
I just found this site, and I'm really excited because it's a lot like Vocab Sushi (above), but it's really free!