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.
View and post ESL job offers and resumes. This site has a
series of boards where teachers can post their resumes
and view job offers posted by schools. Viewing and
posting resumes and job offers is free.
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.
From Deborah Healey and the English Language Institute at
Oregon State University. A number of resources dealing
with technology in the classroom (MS Word, PowerPoint,
concordancing, Web, etc.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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....
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.
How to use the data-driven approach to language learning
and teaching without access to large corpora.
Concentrates on "small, informally produced
corpora."
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.
Interesting discussion of the semantic relations between
collocates. The analysis of the word cause in
section 5.1 and of the words in the following sections is
quite interesting.
Good introduction to the subject. Parts are available in
PDF format. The section on "corpus techniques and
tools" explains Type/Token ratio, Mutual Information
score, T-score, and KWIC concordancing, among others.
An online concordancer which can use one of several
different corpora.
Try "LOB Corpus" (British English) or
"Brown Corpus" (American English) to start.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 (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.
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.
Dennie Hoopingarner's game creator. Create
Concentration, Drag and Drop, Timed Matching, Sentence
Mix, Cloze, Multiple-Choice, "Storyboard," and
Vocabulary Drill. This site has the older version of
Game-O-Matic, but it is very easy to use.
Add cascading style sheets to your web site with this
free version of 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.
Prepare your images for the Web with Paint Shop Pro. It
has most of the features of Adobe Photoshop at a fraction
of the price. It will satisfy all but the most demanding
professional photographers; for everyone else, this
program is more than enough. A great program.
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.
This FTP client makes it virtually foolproof to upload
your web files to your server. Fast and simple to use,
with many features for more advanced users. Free for
personal, educational, and non-profit use.
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.
PDFCreator is an open source application that can create PDF's, Postscript and Encapsulated Postscript files from just about any program that prints using windows printers. You can also create images from your documents, combine documents, add security features and much more. Free.
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.
Professional Organizations