TESL webliography

Walcir suggested I add my Webliography to my blog, so here it goes!
A listing of useful reading, writing and vocabulary sites for the ESL/EFL teacher.

Reading

Reading Group Guides
URL: http://readinggroupguides.com/
Not specifically geared towards the ESL class, this site is of value to any ESL teacher who wants to add a book to a class and promote insightful discussion. The lists of guides are separated by topic / genre. The guides include a description of the book and discussion questions. Some also feature the author’s bio, an interview and an excerpt from the book. Great for any ESL teacher who is “literature-challenged.”

Folger Lesson Plan Archive
URL: http://www.folger.edu/eduLesPlanArch.cfm?cid
This site does not offer exercises per se but a wide array of lesson plans involving the reading of the plays of Shakespeare and divided by general, elementary, film and interactive media lessons and by play. They are adequate for intermediate to advanced ESL learners. They are for the most part topic-oriented and promote communicative learning teaching. The lesson plans are complete, the design is impeccable and all necessary extra documents are downloadable. This is a highly recommendable site.

The University of Victoria’s English Language Centre Study Zone
URL: http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/index.htm
This site offers various exercises for five levels of learners. The first levels clearly split the reading exercises from the writing, vocabulary and grammar ones. They are skill-specific and concentrate on multiple-choice reading comprehension questions, story recreations and gap-fill exercises. The higher levels offer more integrated exercises, such as sentence-ordering, cloze, sentence writing and skimming and scanning exercises.

English works! Gallaudet University
URL: http://depts.gallaudet.edu/englishworks/reading/main/indexframe.htm
The most helpful element of this site is its sections on ‘Reading and Maping Strategies’ and ‘Types of questions and Tests,’ which offer ESL teachers a good guide to creating reading activities and tests. This site also has interactive reading exercises, mostly reading comprehension and cloze exercises that are interesting and offer detailed correct answer explanations.

Story Archives
URL: http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html
This site offers a wealth of stories that can be used in the ESL class. They are divided into categories such as adventure, business, health, environment, education and so on, which makes pinpointing a specific topic easy. Each story is offered in a full and an abridged version, hence authentic and simplified texts, as well as the story’s outline which are useful if the teachers wishes to create a dictocomp activity. The site is clear and easy to navigate. It is a great story resource for ESL teachers.

Online Book Club
URL: http://readinggroupsonline.com/
This site allows you to either join an existing reading group or to create a new one. Discussions can be conducted via chat rooms or message boards (provided by the site), or Listserv, email or web pages. This tool can be used to compliment one class or several ESL classes from different countries.


Writing

Spider-Man in Amazing Adventures
URL: http://www.ed.gov/inits/americareads/spidey/spidey.html
This site features some reading but mostly writing exercises all based on the action figure Spider-Man, which is especially fun for the younger ESL learners. This site is not an interactive exercise site. Rather, it offers downloadable pdf exercise sheets. They are an assortment of fill-in the conversation bubbles, cross-word puzzles, word games, create your own super hero and cloze activities.

Writing Exercises for Engineers and Scientists
URL: http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/
This site is great for any ESL learner who wishes to improve their scientific academic writing. It covers the various genres of writing (memos, résumés, lab reports, progress reports, dissertations, etc), the expected academic style as well as many writing exercises (grammar, punctuation, usage, parts of speech, etc) to help the student polish their compositions.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
URL: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
“This book is intended for use in English courses in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature,” states its introduction. It generally covers elementary rules of usage and principles of composition, and it’s free! An invaluable tool for students and teachers alike.

Creative Writing Process
URL: http://www.nzcal.com/hp/adk/index.php
This site covers all the stages of process writing, explaining what to do and why. It can be used by teachers who need a refresher of the process writing stages (from brainstorming to outlining to drafting to editing), though the site is mainly directed to students. It also samples some proofers marks.

Creative Writing Activities
URL: http://www.creative-writing.ch/active.html
This site offers several engaging writing activities that can be used in the ESL classroom. There are group / workshop activities as well as individual ones. They are well detailed and explained as one would expect from an activities book. This site is great for giving teachers some content ideas.

Web English Teacher
URL: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/creative.html
This site basically links to others that offer writing exercises, ideas and prompts. It is a great site to help teachers find inspiring writing practices for their students. This site also offers a wealth of links pertaining to other English teaching oriented subject, such as ESL/TESOL/EFL, children’s literature, critical thinking, poetry, Shakespeare, speech & debate, vocabulary, etc. Worth bookmarking!


Vocabulary

The Works of the Bard
URL: http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~matty/Shakespeare/test.html
This Shakespeare concordance is simple and straightforward. You simply type in a string of words (indications to maximize the search are given) and the concordance pulls out all plays and sonnets where it can be found. This is a very helpful site to help integrate Shakespeare by topic into a language lesson.

Lextutor
URL: http://www.lextutor.ca/
This site has a wealth of vocabulary tools for the ESL teacher. It includes a concordance, a i+1 output writing tool, a word level knowledge test, various exercises that include lists of the different word level and much more. This site can be used by teacher to create exercises or by advanced students who wish to examine their language (vocabulary) level.

Merriam-Webster Online
URL: http://www.m-w.com
This site is more than just a dictionary. It also offers a thesaurus, word-of-the-day with a complete description of the word’s origins, a collection of romance words and their literary etymology, links to Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster for Kids. Of special interest to ESL learners, each word definition comes equipped with a sound file featuring its North American pronunciation.

Englishpage.com
URL: http://www.englishpage.com/vocabulary/vocabulary.html
This page offers several online vocabulary exercises in the shape of cloze activities that can be done by the ESL learner. They are divided by topic and can easily be used as homework/post-activities. The design is consistent and easy to use. This site also offers several grammar activities that are equally good.

Vocabulary & Affixation
URL: http://www.learn4good.com/languages/toefl/vocabulary.htm
The vocabulary listed on this site is considered necessary to know in order to successfully complete the TOEFL exam, which is of interest to many ESL/EFL students. This site stands out because it also offers a complete list of the root, prefixes and suffixes of these words so that learners may practice deducing word meaning by its affixes.