Being an ESL teacher can be a difficult, yet rewarding, job. Textbooks can be very helpful. There are plenty of great textbooks out there, but many ESL learners cannot afford to spend a lot of money those big and thick workbooks. Fortunately, there are many fantastic online free resources that you can easily implement into a lesson plan. Here are some of the most useful educational resources and teaching ideas available on the internet for ESL teachers.
TEFL Tunes
Plenty of scientific research has shown that many people learn best when their lesson is set to a tune. TEFL Tunes has lessons based on songs that help students to understand grammatical concepts such as the present perfect tense. Their free section has a wide variety of works by artists ranging from Beyonce to the Beatles.
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a great educational resource for adults and students. It provides creative writing prompts that encourage learners to use English to express their thoughts and opinions. This resource also provides quizzes, games, and tutorials to help people learn how to write longer essays in English.
ESL Galaxy
ESL Galaxy has an incredibly wide variety of ESL lesson plans for both adults and young kids. Altogether, they have over two thousand worksheets that ESL teachers can print out for their classes. The worksheets often take the form of crossword puzzles or other simple games that make learning fun without being juvenile.
Teaching English at British Council
Here you can find a variety of articles about English lesson plans. A creative teaching idea for classes can be spotted throughout the blog posts. You can find a range of stories in the world of second language teaching. That said, not only you are able to add value into your lesson plan, you can also develop your skills in language teaching.
Breaking News English
Their website may not be flashy, but it provides breaking news articles that can be viewed in a variety of different learning levels. Breaking News English helps to provide real information and give students a chance to discover useful terminology instead of just reading endless paragraphs crammed with vocabulary words. Adult students will appreciate ESL lessons that do not make them feel like schoolchildren.
ESL at About
The main goal of ESL at About is to promote communicative ESL skills. They provide excellent techniques for both educators and learners. This site is a good place to read articles about education trends and ESL Issues. There are also many worksheets with talking points and discussion questions that can lead a class to discuss interesting and stimulating topics.
TEFL.net
The main benefit of TEFL.net is that it is extraordinarily customizable. Teachers can generate their own worksheets and quizzes quickly and easily. Though the website does provide many ready-made worksheets and lesson plans, it is nice to be able to create your own unique teaching resources.
Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
This website is useful for students who are trying to better their listening and speaking skills. Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab provides listening quizzes for several different learning levels, from beginning to advanced. The listening quizzes are extremely valuable for ESL classes with less literate people, and they also provide useful information about common conversations that ESL students will encounter.
BBC Learning English
This website provides a vast amount of resources for adult ESL teachers. The lessons are based on life skills, such as finding an apartment or using a subway, and BBC Learning English also provides lessons on business English. They even have humorous online television series centered around various grammatical concepts.
ESL Games World
If all of the students in your class have access to computers, this is a fun website for everyone to visit. ESL Games World has interactive computer games, such as Snakes and Ladders or Wheel of Fortune, which also teach English. The site’s wide variety of games includes ones for children and ones for adults. In addition to the online games, teachers can also print games for classroom usage.
These resources will ensure that your students get all of the instruction and information that they need to learn English. The websites within this list provide everything a teacher needs to share with students, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and even life skills. The internet is a wonderful source of knowledge that makes learning English fun and interesting for ESL students, and the vast collection of lesson plans and worksheets are extremely helpful for an ESL teacher.
The list of free resources is suggested Alicia Hill. Through Point to Point Education, Alicia has had an opportunity to teach ESL Students in Thailand and Korea, along the journey of her teaching jobs in Asia, she has learned that even the most quality textbooks turned out even more amazing with a little supplementing from the internet.