
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.
My Personal Favorites:
These top four are the sites that I always come to first to find specific verb tense explanations and exercises for my students to do after class.
1. Rachel's English
http://www.rachelsenglish.com/how_to
Very comprehensive site in which you can click on a letter, and it takes you to a video of Rachel explaining and demonstrating the sound.
2. American English Pronunciation Practice
Great site with minimal pair practice (contrast of two similar sounds)
3. Sounds of English
http://www.soundsofenglish.org/pronunciation/index.htm
This has a great list of minimal pair and word stress explanations and practice.
4. English with Jennifer
http://www.youtube.com/user/JenniferESL
Jennifer has over 40 videos just for pronunciation, another 70+ on things like vocabulary, grammar, mistakes and slang.
Jennifer's Sentence Stress Lessons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbs5aoqFtVQ
This is the first of three videos that covers a lot of the rules that we discussed in class concerning content & function words and rhythm.
Jennifer's Sentence Rhythm through Rhyme videoJe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N86BsL3l5ZQ
This is a series of three videos in which Jennifer shows the rhythm of English through a few nursery rhymes
ESL Gold Pronunciation
http://www.eslgold.com/pronunciation/sounds_distinctions.html
Good practice for certain contrasting vowels and consonants. Includes activities for stress, intonation and reduction.
Eva Easton
This is a really nice page with lots of examples, practice, links to toher sites and quizzes.
English Meeting
http://www.englishmeeting.com/
Only a few English videos for pronunciation & listening, but this guy is very funy in a dry humor way. Good video for the two "th" sounds.
English Pronunciation: Advanced Practice by Sunny Tseng
This site has some good work on sound reduction, sentence stress, and rhythm. Not all of the exercises have active links, but most do.
Spoken skills—Classroom activities
http://www.spokenskills.com/student-activities.cfm
Another good site for students supplementary practice; lots of phonics, with the ability to record and listen to yourself compared to the original. Has some tongue twisters as well. “ESL Oscars Video clips” has clips several seconds long from the scene of a tv show; good for intonation. There isn't a huge amount of phonetic work, and the site hasn't been updated in a while, but it has some good resources.
Sozo Exchange
This site has a series of videos with idioms, pronunciation, quizzes, etc.
English Consonants
http://englishconsonants.blogspot.com/
This is a nice site for recognizing initial and final consonants. Basically, they are listening exercises in which the students choose from a list of words using the target sound and put them into the correct sentence.
Talk English
This is just audio based, but it has some nice explanation and samples.
ESL Flow
http://www.eslflow.com/pronunciationlessonplans.html
This is a well-known site that links to other sites for activities
Phonetizer
This is a great site for teachers or students who want to use IPA for pronunciation. You just type the text in one box, hit transcribe, and it changes it to IPA for you!!
Language Center Pronunciation Lessons
http://lc.ust.hk/~material/pl/
Note that this site is out of Hong Kong, so there's some British focus and also a lot of Cantonese focus, but it's a good site that not only has tricky vowel and consonant practice, but also a lot of work on syllables, word stress, sentence stress, linking and rhythm.
English Vowel Chart
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/linguistics/resources/phonetics/vowelmap/index.html
Vowel chart with sound