Supercharge Your English: A Guide to the Best Online Resources
Learning English can be an exciting journey, and fortunately, there's a wealth of online resources available to help you along the way. Whether you're focused on improving your listening skills, expanding your vocabulary, mastering grammar, or simply looking for engaging ways to practice, this article will guide you through some of the best options.
Comprehensive Platforms
These platforms offer a wide range of activities and resources to cater to different learning styles and levels.
Ellii: Ellii stands out as a comprehensive platform designed to engage language learners through trending topics and a wealth of resources. It boasts hundreds of ready-made lessons focused on current events and global issues, encouraging student participation, discussion, and dynamic dialogue in every class. Topics covered include everything from "Burnout" and "Vanishing Honeybees" to "AI-Generated Content" and "Space Tourism."
Ellii also focuses on fundamental English skills, with grammar and functional English materials designed to be engaging and enjoyable. Topics covered include "Modals of Possibility," "Noun Clauses," "Prepositions of Place," "Comparative Adjectives," and more. Ellii also offers a variety of kid-friendly materials to inspire young learners to love learning English.
Ellii provides teachers with tools such as a Kanban-style Lesson Planner, which allows them to easily set up a customized curriculum for every class and instantly assign lessons. The platform also includes a Grade Feed tool, which allows teachers to quickly give star ratings, grades, and written or audio feedback to students. Ellii also offers a PDF viewer with annotation tools and sharing options.
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ManyThings.org: Grammar and vocabulary practice for all levels, including many bilingual quizzes for beginners.
Honing Specific Skills
Sometimes, you need to focus on a particular area of English. These resources specialize in specific skills.
Listening Comprehension
Voice of America (VOA) - English in a Minute: Looking for ways to improve your listening skills and learn English idioms? Check out Voice of America's English in a Minute and listen to brief video clips that explain American English colloquialisms.
VOA - American Short Stories: Voice of America's weekly multimedia series of American short stories for English language learners. Each story will have video, audio, quizzes, and a lesson plan for teachers.
Storynory: Audiobooks, news stories, short stories, songs and radio dramas. Choose between faster or slower listening speeds and read along with the texts of the stories and songs.
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Vocabulary Building
Games to Learn English: Practice vocabulary and grammar with short lessons that are like playing a game.
Pronunciation Practice
Rachel's English: This site includes a special page on pronunciation, including practice with minimal pairs.
The Color Vowel Chart: This is a powerful tool for teaching spoken English. It helps teachers incorporate pronunciation into lessons. Check out the chart, the teacher’s guide, and the webinar on how to teach with The Color Vowel Chart.
Reading Comprehension
Reading Skills for Today's Adults: This site includes videos with native speakers explaining key reading concepts like critical reading, summarizing and scanning, and key life skills like signing a lease and reading a medicine label. Following each video is a comprehension quiz.
Resources for Specific Audiences
Some resources are tailored for specific groups of learners.
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We Speak NYC (formerly We Are New York): We Speak NYC is the City’s English Language Learning program.
Mango Languages: For NYPL cardholders, remember that Mango Languages is available to you through the Library. It features ESL lessons for Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese speakers.
NASA Kid’s Club: From engaging multimedia to exciting games, NASA Kid’s Club has learning materials for every budding scientist and engineer. The more you play, the more you learn!
Voices of Youth: Voices of Youth is UNICEF’s online place for young people to learn more about issues affecting their world. Discover more about issues such as human rights, Education, health, the environment and learn about what young people are doing to make a difference.
Interactive Activities and Games
Learning should be fun! These resources use games and interactive activities to make learning more engaging.
Education.com: The site includes educational games organized by grade level, from 1st to 5th, and is particularly good for spelling and phonics.
Word Bricks: The latest Word Bricks game, Sorting Race, can be played with just a few extra minutes in class. To play the game, players race to find all words of a certain type in a set of Word Bricks.
Describe and Guess: In Describe and Guess, players take turns selecting a Word Brick and then describing one of the words on the brick without saying the actual word. Download the game and instructions!
Brick Bingo: Brick Bingo helps students make connections between the spoken and written forms of words in a fun, low-stress game. Download the game and instructions!
Picture This: Same & Different provides students with the opportunity to use their background knowledge about the items on the 'Picture This' cards to create descriptions that compare and contrast two items on a card.
Use-a-Word: This board game provides students with a specific word they should try to use in a sentence. Download the game, instructions, and game variations.
Resources for Teachers
The Center for Applied Linguistics: The Center for Applied Linguistics offers everything from information on immersion programs to the newest research and guidance on best practices for teachers. Visit regularly to keep up to date on research-based strategies and practical hands-on tools to help develop effective classroom activities.
The National Center for English Language Acquisition: The National Center for English Language Acquisition provides a broad range of research and resources in support of an inclusive approach to high quality education for English Learners.
Teaching Jazz Chants to Young Learners: Teaching Jazz Chants to Young Learners is a video-based teacher training resource available on DVD that presents one compelling technique for teaching English pronunciation, intonation, and sentence stress: the jazz chant.
Cultural Immersion
Learning a language is also about understanding the culture. These resources can help you immerse yourself in American culture.
The White House: Have you ever wondered what happens inside the White House? You can through this interactive virtual tour. Visit again and again to: watch exclusive videos; tour the West Wing, Residence, East Wing, and South Lawn; and learn about the use of the White House rooms throughout history.
We The People: The National Endowment for the Humanities presents We The People. Find numerous resources dedicated to learning more about American history, culture, and democratic principles.
Celebrate!: This book discusses the ten federally-recognized holidays in the United States, as well as many celebratory days. Download as an e-book or as individual PDF chapters.
Road Trip Activities: What is a road trip? Why are road trips popular in the United States? Find out more with this set of activities based on music by the award winning ukulele player Victoria Vox.
El Paso Song: In the song El Paso, folk/indie singer, songwriter and internet sensation Danielle “Ate the Sandwich” Anderson thinks back on the experiences she had in El Paso. Listen online or download the MP3.
New Orleans Song: Jazz musician Kermit Ruffins Louisiana sings about his native city of New Orleans, which is considered the birthplace of jazz music.
Department of the Treasury: Department of the Treasury has a fun and engaging site for kids on how money is produced and distributed.
Additional Resources
Oxford University Press: This site from Oxford University Press has activities to practice spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and listening.
Dialogs for Everyday Use: Dialogs for Everyday Use is a collection of thirty situational dialogs that focus on a wide variety of communicative situations and natural encounters in English.
FEMA: Have you ever wondered what causes earthquakes? The Federal Emergency Management Agency presents a six unit activity package that assesses student knowledge of earthquakes and provides information about preparedness and emergency management.
Trace Effects: The manual provides information on teaching using online games and gives ideas for extending beyond the game using easy, interactive tasks for Chapter 6 and 7 of Trace Effects.
FreeEnglishNow: Free English courses for speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Start at the basic level or take tests to move to higher levels.
ESL Discussion Forums: A forum for both ESL teachers and students around the world. Includes quizzes, grammar explanations, and discussion forums for students.
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