Teachers: Resources of interest to ESL teachers

Resources of interest to ESL teachers.

Table of Contents

Video page for EFL/ESL Teachers

Professional Organizations
Electronic Journals
Techniques and Theory
Tools
Materials
Publishers' Resource Sites
Concordancing and Corpus Linguistics
Web Concordancers
Software
Phonetics
Concordancing
Authoring Software
Web Site Creation and Maintenance

Professional Organizations

TESOL Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages: Founded in 1966, the global education association, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, has approximately 14,000 members in over 120 countries, and is recognized as a non-governmental organization (NGO) of the United Nations Department of Public Information.

CATESOL California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages: CATESOL represents teachers of English language learners throughout California and Nevada.

MEXTESOL La Asociación Mexicana de Maestros de Inglés, A.C. (MEXTESOL): MEXTESOL represents teachers of English in Mexico and is affiliated with TESOL.

IATEFL: IATEFL supports over 3,500 English Language Teaching professionals in more than one hundred different countries.

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Electronic Journals

Asian EFL Journal: A refereed online journal for Asian TEFL research.

Educational Technology & Society: Many online articles available.

FORUM English Teaching Forum Online: A quarterly journal published by the U.S. Department of State for teachers of English as a foreign or second language.

Internet TESL Journal For Teachers of English as a Second Language: A monthly journal from Japan. Very practical.

JALT Journal: JALT Journal is the research journal of the Japan Association for Language Teaching.

The Language Teacher: The Language Teacher is the monthly publication of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Zenkoku Gogaku Kyoiku Gakkai).

Language Learning & Technology: A refereed journal for second and foreign language educators.

Language Learning & Technology Archives: Browse articles by author, title, topic, and issue, and well as books by author or title, and software reviews.

Ask A Linguist: This service is provided by The LINGUIST List. It is not a journal, but a place where anyone interested in language or linguistics can ask a question and get the response of a panel of professional linguists.

MEXTESOL Journal: MEXTESOL Journal Online

TESL-EJ Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language: Each article is reviewed by at least two knowledgeable scholars.

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Techniques and Theory

Teaching Vocabulary Through Data-driven Learning Erin Shaw [PDF]: An excellent introduction to the principles of vocabulary teaching and teaching with corpus linguistics (data-driven learning). Excellent tips on using The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

Why & how to use frequency lists to learn words Tom Cobb: Using frequency lists to learn vocabulary. Designed to help students learn vocabulary.

Using the Lexical Approach for the Acquisition of ESP Vocabulary: Using the lexical approach in English for Specific Purposes.

The Language Learning Benefits of Extensive Reading [PDF]: How language learners can develop their language knowledge through extensive reading.

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Tools

Text Analyser from UsingEnglish: This tool provides a statistical analysis of your text, which includes word count, unique words, number of sentences, average words per sentence, lexical density, and Gunning Fog Readability Index. The advanced version, which is available by registering (free) also provides you with a grammar analysis tool, a fully sortable word frequency list, a breakdown of the text by word length, and an option which provides notes on each word such as its place in other word frequency lists. An excellent tool to help you determine the difficulty of a text.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor: For data-driven language learning on the web. Word lists, cloze maker, MultiConc, Vocabprofile, concordancers, Range, and much more. Extremely useful. From the Université du Québec à Montréal.

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Materials

DLTK's Crafts for Kids: This site features a nice variety of fun, printable children's crafts, coloring pages and more.

The International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode: Excellent resource for using phonetic fonts. A large list of available fonts and font links. TITUS Cyberbit (free for private use) contains not only IPA symbols, but many complete language sets such as Arabic, Cyrillic, Devengari, Greek, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Thai, etc.

WordLearner^TM: This new web site is designed by Chris Lacey, author of Teacher's Pet, to help you learn or teach words in any language. You can access word packs and share yours with others.

englishmaterials.com: englishmaterials.com is a new website offering worksheets and audio files for use in the language classroom. Membership and downloads are free. Selection is still a bit limited, but the quality of the material is excellent.

Handouts Online: Handouts Online has an excellent selection of English worksheets for EFL/ESL teachers. The worksheets are very professionally done. Membership is US$18 for an individual one-year subscription with unlimited access to all worksheets. Several free sample worksheets are available for download.

esl-lounge.com: Excellent site offering free ESL Lesson Materials for TEFL and TESOL teachers. Grammar, reading comprehension, worksheets, song lyrics, board games, pronunciation, flashcards, surveys, role plays and more. Many levels. All free and printable. Also on site: Teachers' forum, TEFL Guide, Student site, ESL links, and teachers' embarrassing tales....

Online Resources for TEFL Professionals: The U.S. Department of State's list of online resources for EFL teachers.

Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom: The Internet TESL Journal's collection of conversation questions is highly recommended for getting students to talk. The collection contains a wide variety of topics, and each topic usually has two to four pages of questions. I have found that these work best if the students are instructed not to answer simply yes or no but to give the reason why or some extra information in their answers. I have used these with students from many different countries with great success. You will have to edit the lists for duplicates,length, and grammatical appropriateness. Teachers are encouraged to add their own questions to the lists on the site for the benefit of others.

Royalty-Free Clip Art Collection for Foreign/Second Language Instruction: Very good collection of drawings illustrating verbs, adjectives, and nouns that can be used in the ESL/EFL classroom.

Arthur's Clipart: A collection of high-quality clipart free for personal use.

Free Clipart Pictures: Very nice collection of photographs of animals, food, flowers, and fish. The fruit and vegetables are especially well done.

Do-It-Yourself English Teaching Activities Language Discovery and Exploration Tools for English Teachers, Translators, and Writers: A great resource for teachers interested in devising lessons based on the lexical approach. Archived page. No longer maintained.

RestaurantRow.com: A great source for menus. Lists over 165,000 restaurants in over 13,000 cities--many with menus which can be printed for classroom activities.

Song Lyrics - ESL-Lounge: A large selection of song lyrics.

Drew's Script-O-Rama: Huge collection of film and TV scripts.

The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb): Read or download movie scripts for free from this large collection.

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Publishers' Resource Sites

Azar Grammar Exchange The Companion Website to the Azar Grammar Series
Fun with Grammar Download Page More than 200 communicative, task-based games and activities for your grammar classes. Free PDF download.
Let's Talk Teacher Support
Pearson Longman Resources for Teachers
Macmillan's Onestopenglish
University of Michigan ESL Companion Websites
University of Michigan Web-only Additional Resources

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Concordancing and Corpus Linguistics

David Lee's Bookmarks for Corpus-based Linguists: An excellent list of annotated links for linguists and language teachers interested in working with corpora.

Corpus Linguistics: What It Is and How It Can Be Applied to Teaching: A good introduction to corpus linguistics and teaching. Discussion, examples, and resource links.

Improvising corpora for ELT: quick-and-dirty ways of developing corpora for language teaching: How to use the data-driven approach to language learning and teaching without access to large corpora. Concentrates on "small, informally produced corpora."

Sensing the Winds of Change: An Introduction to Data-Driven Learning: Discusses the feasibility of data-driven learning EFL teaching.

Corpus Linguistics: A Practical Web-based Course

How to use concordances in teaching English: Some ideas on using concordances in the classroom.

Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers: This site has 16 training modules for teachers using computers in language teaching. Excellent resource.

Using Corpora in Language Teaching and Learning Special Issue of Language Learning & Technology, Volume 5, Number 3, September 2001: There are nine major articles covering, among other things, the types of corpora that are the most useful for language learning and teaching, practical applications, and using corpora in grammar teaching. Complete issue or individual articles available in HTML or PDF.

ICT4LT Module 2.4 Using concordance programs in the modern foreign languages classroom: Discusses the use of concordances and concordancers in the modern foreign languages classroom.

Concordancing in the CEGEPs: Non-technical explanation of how teachers can use concordance software.

Analysis of Corpora: Describes the essential tasks involved in analyzing a corpus.

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Web Concordancers

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): "The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is the largest freely-available corpus of English, and the only large and balanced corpus of American English. It was created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University in 2008...."

BNCWeb: Access the BNC (British National Corpus) from your browser. Registration is free.

Web Concordancer (English): An online concordancer which can use one of several different corpora.
Try "LOB Corpus" (British English) or "Brown Corpus" (American English) to start.

Business Letter Corpus using Online KWIC Concordancer: An online concordancer which lets you search a one-million-word Business Letter Corpus (BLC2000) and returns the search result in the KWIC format.

Search PICLE and other corpora with a PERL concordancer: PICLE is the Polish sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). Also contains small academic and scientific corpora.

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Software

Phonetics

WaveSurfer: WaveSurfer is an Open Source audio editor widely used for studies of acoustic phonetics. It can be used to visualize and analyze sound in several ways. The standard analysis plug-in can display Waveform, Spectrogram, Pitch, Power or Formant panes. It can read and write a number of transcription file formats used in industrial speech research including TIMIT.

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Concordancing

AntConc: "AntConc is a freeware, multiplatform tool for carrying out corpus linguistics research and data-driven learning. It runs on any computer running Microsoft Windows (tested on Win 98/Me/2000/NT, XP, Vista, Win 7), Macintosh OS X (tested on 10.4.x, 10.5.x, 10.6.x), and Linux (tested on Ubuntu 10)." It includes the following tools: Concordance Tool, Concordance Plot Tool, File View Tool, Clusters (N-Grams), Collocates, Word List, and Keyword List. It is surprisingly versatile for a freeware program.

Concordance: An extremely powerful program which allows the user to make concordances and word lists, count word frequencies, compare different usages of a word, analyze keywords, find phrases and idioms, publish concordances on the Internet, and much more. It is extremely fast and can pick 15,000 occurrences of a word from a 1.5MB text in under 4 seconds on a 600MHz Pentium III. Its Windows interface makes it simple for anyone familiar with a PC to operate. An ESL teacher can use a concordancer to check usage against grammar rules (you might be surprised by the results), make sophisticated vocabulary exercises, and more. I highly recommend this concordancer to any teacher who is interested in corpus linguistics, English usage or the lexical approach to language teaching.

Collocation Test: A freeware program that enables users to find collocations for a particular word or for every word. Users can calculate collocation strength using five statistical methods: log likelihood, (pointwise) mutual information, chi square, cubic association ratio (Mi3), and Frager and McGowan coefficient.

Paul Nation's Range Vocabulary Program: Visit Paul Nation's website and download his free vocabulary program in ZIP format that examines vocabulary in texts and compares it to frequency lists. The program provides teachers with a fast and easy way to judge the reading difficulty of texts.

TextSTAT (Simple Text Analysis Tool - Concordance software): A very nice freeware concordance program authored by Matthias Hüning.

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Authoring Software

Hot Potatoes: Hot Potatoes consists of six applications which allow you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the Internet. Most of the interactive exercises on this site were created using Hot Potatoes. A wonderful program. Free for non-commercial use (see web site for details).

TexToys: TexToys consists of two programs that let you create exercises in which students have to guess missing words or rearrange jumbled segments. See the Story Building and Text Reconstruction Exercises on the reading page.

The Cloze Test: This small program creates a standard cloze test. Free software.

Teacher's Pet: Teacher's Pet is a free add-in for Microsoft Word, which contains a series of macros that allow the teacher to create jumbled sentences, cloze exercises, flashcards, and much more. These can then be printed and photocopied for classroom use.

QuizFaber: QuizFaber (previously known as QuizMaker) is a nice program that allows the creation of multimedia quizzes (multiple choice, multiple answers, true/false, open answer, gap fill, matching words) as HTML documents. Unlike Hot Potatoes, QuizFaber's format (three HTML documents for each quiz) prevents students from seeing the answers. Freeware from Italy.

Marmo Soemarmo's JavaScript Templates: An excellent collection of 16 free JavaScript templates for making your own interactive tests. The collection includes templates for true-false, multiple choice, short answer, cloze, and more.

Quiz Generator for Marmo Soemarmo's Multiple-choice Quiz Template: Charles Kelly's quiz generator makes it easy to create JavaScript quizzes.

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Web Site Creation and Maintenance

HTML-Kit: HTML-Kit is an editor you can use to create, edit, validate, preview and publish web pages. Highly recommended. Free download.

TopStyle 4: Add cascading style sheets to your web site with the world's best CSS editor. By separating style from content, style sheets enable you to change fonts, colors, and other styles sitewide with just a few keystrokes. They also reduce page size and speed up loading. Well worth the cost.

Paint Shop Pro X3: Prepare your images for the Web with Paint Shop Pro X3. It has most of the features of Adobe Photoshop at a fraction of the price (now on sale for $29.99). It will satisfy all but the most demanding professional photographers; for everyone else, this program is more than enough. A great program. Full of new features such as Express Lab, Smart Carver, Vibrancy, Object Extractor, Windows 7 and Windows Vista compatability.

FastStone Image Viewer: FastStone Image Viewer is a user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. Its features include image viewing, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. It also has access to EXIF information, a thumbnail browser and other features such as hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, Cr2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG). Free.

CSE HTML Validator Lite Free HTML Editor and HTML Checker.: An excellent free validator for checking your HTML. Finds the mistakes and tells you how to correct them.

Xenu's Link Sleuth: Xenu checks Web sites for broken links with amazing speed. Enables you to keep your links up to date. Freeware.

FileZilla: An excellent free FTP client. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

IZArc: IZArc is a great utility which allows you to create and extract compressed archives in most formats such as 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, Bz2, BZA, CAB, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MBF, MIM, PAK, Pk3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, Yz1, Z, ZIP, and ZOO. Free, but the author would appreciate a donation. If you download compressed files from academic sites, they are probably TAR files, which IZArc handles easily. It also has multilanguage support.

Inkscape: Inkscape is the leading Open Source SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) vector drawing tool. It has a wealth of features and a user-friendly interface. Inkscape also allows you to save vector drawings as PNG images. Make your own illustrations with this program. There are many tutorials for Inkscape available on the Web. Free.

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This page was last modified on 08/16/11

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