USEFUL LINKS FOR
TEACHERS
Here are some links to sites which you
might find useful for your professional development, to use in class,
or to suggest to your students. It's a personal choice and includes
only sites which I have found on the Internet and which seem to have
useful content. I haven't included any "links" pages, because they are
easy to find with a quick search, but also because they can sometimes
contain a lot of rubbish! So less is more, I hope! If you do find any
of the links below no longer work, or disappoint in terms of their
content, please let me know by dropping me an e-mail. Likewise, if you
have any sites to suggest.
Daniel - Madrelingua School
of English
- www.oup.com/elt/students/
The site Oxford University Press uses to showcase its various books.
Much of the stuff on it is of little value (except to them, obviously),
but there are some real gems if you know where to look. Click on the English File
icon and there are online exercises for elementary,
pre-intermediate and intermediate levels - the only drawback is that
the material is only indexed using "File 1, File 2, .." etc. so if
you're not actually using the coursebook, you'll need to experiment a
bit to find what you need. Nevertheless, its worth the
effort.
Another icon worth clicking on is the new (at the time
of writing in 2006) Natural English
coursebook. This one has all four
levels, so you'll find stuff up to upper-intermediate level. I must
confess I had already received a trial copy of this book and didn't
give it more than a glance, particularly since I once lost a job as a
result of a negative lesson observation from one of the authors..
However, the website resources have convinced me to have another look!
Leaving aside the grammar section, which is formulaic nothing special,
the "natural English" content is particularly good and really lives up
to its name. The site suffers from the same drawback as the English
file site, in the sense that there is no index. However, it's
definitely worth checking out for use with classes or
individual students, or for exercises to set as self-study.
These two
sites alone should provide enough
material to last most teachers of general adult courses a long time!
- www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies
Teach
small children? You couldn't do better than to start here! Activities
and games
for kids based on BBC programes. Using them together with a BBC video
(visit Madrelingua's video library!) adds value too! My daughter was
entranced by the stories here!
- www.esl-lab.com
A fantastic listening resource site with exercises and scripts! Watch
out for the thousands of ads though..
- www.edu.ge.ch I can't work out why
a Swiss site is hosting a hobby site run by an English English teacher
now based in Canada.. It's not OUP, but there are some fun things to
find if you look for them.
- www.teachingenglish.org.uk
BBC site for for teachers in association with the
British Council. Articles to read and a free pronunciation chart to
download.
- www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish
BBC World Service's "Learning English" site. Check out the series "The
Flatmates" - there are over 50 archived episodes, each with a
strip
cartoon thingy and audio. Lots of fun... Another thing that caught my
eye, perfect for higher-level students demanding "business English" was
a series of short talks by Charles Handy "The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management".
They're audio files with pdf scripts, so your students can read and
listen at the same time.
- www.britishcouncil.org/central.htm
Considering
that the British Council is the most prestigious and
well-resourced English-teaching organisation in the world, this is a
strangely disappointing website. The design is great but the content is
extremely limited with lots more supposed to be "coming soon". Perhaps
its a result of the fact they seem to employ 3 managers for every
teacher... At the time of writing
the only thing I could find that I really liked was a page of short stories in mp3 format which
can be downloaded (typescripts are also available, which is nice). Come
on British Council, buck up!
- www.britishcouncil.org/kids
The British Council's site for kids. There ought to be something good
on it somewhere, given the ammount of taxpayer's money involved, but my
initial
impression was much the same as for the adult site above. Check out the
story maker - I can't help feeling
that the BBC does this sort of thing with more conviction...
- education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/teaching
The Guardian is a UK newspaper with weekly pages (lots of job ads.)
covering the TEFL industry. The content doesn't seem to change much,
but it makes a change to see the industry get any coverage at all in
the mainstream press, even if it is sponsored by the ubiquitous Cactus.
- www.eslcafe.com
A famous site for EFL/ESL teachers - it's on every list, but only just
made it onto mine, as I couldn't see that much of value. The only thing
that I liked was the "Ideas cookbook", a place where people list there
ideas for classroom activities under an appropriate heading (i.e.
business English).
- www.englishclub.com/learn-english.htm
A slick site but one that suffers a little from British Council-itis
(see above). At least they have a sense of humour though: visit the "resting buttons" page!
- www.englishdatabase.com
Nice ideas, particularly the song-based lessons with worksheets to
download. However, getting the actual songs might be a pain as they
appear not to be available on the site.
- www.archive.org
Literature and other texts to download.
- www.npr.org
Site of America's National Public Radio, listen live to the US version
of the BBC! It's supposed to be terribly liberal...
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