TEFL TEFL Resources
Resources to help you find websites, books, and other tools connected to TEFL. Make your English teaching life easier!
Online Resource: Cutting Edge Companion Website
Via the Longman site, the Cutting Edge companion website allows teachers or students to select a level and find quizzes and other resources that fit with the theme in the book. You can find links romantic love letters on the web in Intermediate Module One, as well as links to time management tips on the web. I chose to have a look specifically at the Cutting Edge companion site specifically, but there are as many sites as series of Longman books – in fact, probably more. As far as I can tell, you don’t need to register to use many of the resources.
Also available for Cutting Edge are worksheets which provide further practice of the topics in the books. I have to say they are nothing earth-shattering, but if you have students who want more practice and papers (and I’m mostly serious here: some students see paper practice as what counts), this may be the key. Certainly you should check that it fits the needs of your learners, but instead of searching around the school’s library for something that practices specifically what you’ve dealt with in class, or writing something yourself – use these. I think they would be especially good for additional practice of the Wordspot portion of each unit.
Date: May 15th, 2007 |
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Resource: True Stories In The News
True Stories In The News, along with its sidekicks More True Stories In The News, Easy True Stories In The News, and others, is a resource to look out for. Stories are adapted from – as the title implies – true stories in the news, and usually have some unusual, unbelievable or bizarre focus: the woman who drove to work with her cat on top of her car; the man who invented a bed that yells at you and throws you on the floor if you don’t wake up; babies switched at birth in Brazil. My personal favorite has to be Dear Mr. Andropov, the story of Samantha Smith, the American girl who wrote a letter to the Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Andropov in the early 80’s discussing peace between the US and USSR and received a personal invitation to the country (damn, I think I’m too old to do this, but it was a good idea!).
Date: May 12th, 2007 |
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Resource: Larry Ferlazzo’s “Website Of The Day” Blog
Recently I stumbled across Larry Ferlazzo’s Website Of The Day For Teaching ELL, ESL & EFL and was impressed with the collection of resources available on his English for beginners/lower intermediate page.
As it’s a blog dedicated to “websites of the day”, the main component of it is obviously links to other sites; he points out that his links lead to activities created by others – companies, public institutions or individual teachers – and made available online on blogs or sites.
A couple of my favorites were
-From Game-EFL, an I-Spy-like activity called Huntsville.
-The Clifford Stories (who doesn’t love this big red dog?) from Scholastic.
-From PBS Kids, Word Play where you can “watch” the meaning of words.
Date: April 21st, 2007 |
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Interview With Creators Of “Podcasts In English”, Part 2
In Part 1, pie creators Richard Cain and Jackie McAvoy described how they got started with pie and the challenges and rewards it entails. Why and how – in their words – are podcasts beneficial to both learners and teachers?
“For anyone learning a language they need input – to read or listen to the language. Most people learn from course books or phrase books, but podcasts open up a new realm. A fault with many course book listenings is that they are stilted and often only exist to present a grammar point. This is a hurdle especially for students learning in a non-English environment. Podcasts are generally much freer in their content. For us, we don’t script our podcasts so they sound more natural but we also try to grade our language so they are accessible for lower level students. We want students to be exposed to the language we really use, this includes interrupting, false starts, and slang. Also, rather than use the language to present a grammar point we just think of an interesting topic and then design communicative activities to exploit the language rather than the other way round.
For teachers we hope that the podcasts can provide an interesting alternative, or additional support, to the course book listenings they already use in class. Teachers can also suggest the podcasts for additional listening practice if the language school has a language lab.”
Date: April 20th, 2007 |
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Breaking News English.com: Why I Still Love This Site
The TEFL Logue review of Breaking News English.com was one of the first TEFL Logue Reviews…I have to admit I don’t use a lot of online TEFL resources, but I’m still using Breaking News English. Here’s why this site is a keeper:
The topics are “discussable” – this is perhaps the (second biggest – first is level) stumbling block to using real news articles. The latest political development or technological breakthrough may be newsworthy, but to discuss it you need either a great interest or outside knowledge of it; I find it easy to come up with discussion topics connected to BNE articles; they are specific enough to be interesting yet general enough that most people have or can form an opinion on them.
The level can suit nearly everyone – it’s not difficult to pre-teach a few words and have a lower-level student make some predictions before reading to make it a bit easier, and a student whose level is a little higher can still be challenged by thought-provoking questions or more detailed vocabulary questions.
Date: March 22nd, 2007 |
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TEFL Logue Review: Oxford University Press Teachers’ Club
I’ll admit it: sometimes I make fun of Headway. But I also sometimes teach from Headway – sometimes by choice – and it’s not a bad book. Following Sue’s comment on my post about tapescripts a few weeks ago, I decided to have a look around the Oxford University Press website – and there’s quite a lot of useful stuff there!
The site is massive, with pages, links and activities accompanying many of the Oxford books as well as categories of other information. I checked out the Headway links, mainly the Pre-Intermediate level, and found, in addition to tapescripts in Word which you can print, a crossword puzzle maker, extra readings and listening activities, and a student site where students can play online games, test themselves in self-selected areas, and listen to the Everyday English dialogs. The games are … well, games, and I don’t know that they’d go over well with adults in class – say, in a computer lab, but some students might find them useful at home. I took a test myself and apparently need to work on second conditionals.
Date: May 13th, 2007 |
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Elementary Level E-book Available At Grammarman Comic
If you’ve been lamenting the fact that you don’t live in one of the cities where Grammarman appears in the English language newspaper, and you’ve already checked out the episodes of Grammarman available online, there’s a new arrival: an e-book for elementary readers featuring Grammarman in yet another adventure: Dial G For Grammar. The e-book also features a variety of exercises to keep readers busy - and illustrations by EFL student Pao.
We start at vocabu-lair, Grammarman’s house, and find him studying English grammar after breakfast. It transpires that there have been several robberies as of late. What’s been stolen? Wine, jewellery, gold, luggage, equipment and of course money. Who’s the thief? Grammarman has an idea when Apha-bot offers him coffee with milk and/or sugar.
Any ideas? Keep in mind that Grammarman has many enemies, but only one…
Date: April 30th, 2007 |
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Interview With “Podcasts In English” Creators
Some time ago I came across Podcasts in English (pie) via Grammarmancomic.com, and posted a review of it here. Since then, new podcasts have been added – on topics from life in the land of Hello Kitty and kimonos (at level three) to teachers who wear different color uniforms depending on the day of the week (level two) to shopping in the Philippines (level one).
But what about the minds behind pie? I invited pie creators Richard Cain and Jackie McAvoy to drop by my email inbox and share their experience with pie and insight on podcasts in general.
I first asked Richard Cain about the challenges and rewards of maintaining a podcast sight like pie:
“My partner, Jackie McAvoy, and I were first told about podcasting by a friend of ours who runs a very successful site called www.notesfromSpain.com. He started doing podcasts and really got into it and he encouraged us to do the same. Once we understood what it was all about we were hooked. The initial challenge was to design a website that was easily understood by learners of English, and easy to use too. We looked at many sites beforehand and discussed what we liked or didn’t like about them; we really tried to consider how an English learner would view the site.The site then was designed from scratch and I had to learn new technologies such as password protection and CSS styling. Seeing our website up and running gives us a great thrill. We’ve been getting very positive reactions from people and have only made a few changes to the first design.
The on-going challenge, now we have designed the site, is to produce one podcast every week. Given that the podcasts are only 4 – 7 mins long that doesn’t sound so bad, but we have to interview people, edit the podcast and make sure the quality is good enough, produce the transcript, design worksheets, vocabulary worksheets and webquests - all this takes up considerable time, especially as both myself and Jackie have full time jobs. It’s exciting though that people from more than 100 countries - from Azerbaijan, Iran, Libya, Mongolia to Yemen - have accessed the site.”
Date: April 20th, 2007 |
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Webquest At Grammarmancomic.com: Get Your EFL Students To Create Their Own Comics
Do you need a project to keep your kids’ class busy til the term ends? My own experience teaching kids is rather limited, but it’s not hard to notice that kids everywhere like drawing and cartoons. Exploit this natural interest and use English in the process with the comic-creating Webquest: Awesome Comics activity from Grammarmancomic.com.
Grammarman creator Brian Boyd has designed the Webquest to be done as a series of lessons, ideally over about twelve hours: he offers you and your students the tools to create a hero and corresponding comic and publishes the best submissions he gets online – check out the existing student contributions. I’ve mentioned my difficulty finding material online, but the Grammarman Webquest passes this test (as does Brian Boyd’s Shrek activity, which is how I was first introduced to of all his work). It’s got what you need to get started but also leaves you enough flexibility to adapt it to your particular situation.
In Brief:
Students (hereinafter “the artists”) research and report their findings on what makes a good hero. Links are provided.
The artists design the hero and generate four paragraphs of background information.
They make a sample comic…
…and evaluate their own work.
Date: April 9th, 2007 |
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Cartoon Grammar
Can’t get enough of comics like Grammarman? Or conversely, comics per se are not really up your (or your students’) alley? How about some classic cartoons - featuring Road Runner and Wyle E. Coyote - to practice first present continuous and then past simple?
The same mind that created Grammarman has also found a fun and engaging way to adapt popular cartoons to practice tenses.
Date: March 19th, 2007 |
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