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.
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Siimp
Simple News stories
http://www.simpleenglishnews.com/
Simple (As in only about three sentences!) news stories with the option to listen, some vocabulary highlights.
Literacy Net
http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html
Mildly outdated intermediate-level stories from CNN, with great exercises, including comprehension, sequencing, conclusions and vocabulary work. Can read the full text, an abridged text, or see an outline.
MORE ADVANCED
The Times in Plain English
https://www.thetimesinplainenglish.com/
This is the New York Times, simplified to a low-intermediate level.
5-Minute English
http://www.5minuteenglish.com/reading.htm
These are quite short reading exercises, with short comprehension exercises (thus, the name "5-minute") Even though these are short, they are more appropriate for intermediate + readers due to the lexical complexity.
EFL Club biographies
http://www.eflclub.com/people/people.html
Only five biographies here so far (Che Guevara, Princess Diana, Albert Einstein & JK Rowling) , but great stand-alone lessons with tons of vocabulary, vocab exercises, comprehension questions, and a video link with its own activities!
News English Lessons
http://www.newsenglishlessons.com/
These very short, rather basic, news stories come with a wide variety of activities for teachers to use with them: Cloze exercise, vocab, spelling, listening and conversation activities.
Breaking News English
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
This site is almost exactly like the one above, but the exercises are more advanced even though the news story is almost the same length as those from the site above.
Excelsior College Online Writing Lab
https://owl.excelsior.edu/orc/
This site has an excellent and broad range of reading comprehension exercises, from previewing, asking questions, summarizing, paraphrasing. Has video for each lesson with a printable transcript.
Cengage Learning
http://college.cengage.com/collegesurvival/watkins/learning_companion/1e/students/timed_reading.html
This e-learning site has timed readings for short passages, but the comprehension questions section is no longer working.
Extraordinary People From Around the World:A Downloadable Reader with Discussion Questions
http://pats-eduent.net/xpeople_intro.htm
This online "book" highlights international heroes from a variety of countries. The readings are about three pages long and have discussion questions, but no language work.
English Works! Reading and Mapping strategies
Nice site that teaches students to analyze essays. This is also a great writing site.
E-Reading Summarizing
Lots of handouts (with answers) for learning to write summaries of texts.
How stuff works
Not designed for ESL, but very interesting short reading blurbs on inventions, etc.