Useful (and Fun) Sites for Learning English

[ProfessorVerb]

I've found these sites to be some of the most useful over the years. Please add yours to these and we'll soon have a truly universal list.

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The Knowledge Adventure Encyclopaedia

Information about a large number and variety of interesting topics. "A great homework helper". Simply type a word into the form provided and press enter.

http://www.letsfindout.com/

Fun & Games: Word Search

A Java application that generates a word games (word search, jumbled words and scrabble

http://www.thesaurus.com/fun/wordsearch/

Webster's Word Games of the Day

Got two minutes? Play a new puzzle every day or visit our puzzle archive to play games you missed during the past month. Our word puzzles come in four hot formats:

Definition Demolition:

Use definition clues to unscramble three words before the bomb goes off!
Flip Flop:
It's as easy as matching the synonyms, antonyms, or slang terms before time runs out.
Transform Brainstorm:
Presto chango! Transform one word into another one letter at a time by matching the clues.
Match Maker:

Know your word histories? Or geography? Or history? Prove it with our hot matching challenge

http://www.m-w.com/mw/game/

The Grammar Gorillas

Our friends, the Grammar Gorillas, need help identifying parts of speech. If you click on the right word in the sentence, our friends get a banana. And you know, a gorilla with a banana is a gorilla with appeal. A fun activity for beginner and advanced learners.

http://www.funbrain.com/grammar/

The Virtual Language Centre: Grammar Guide

A self help set of activities for improving grammar. Higher level students only.

http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/GrammarCourse/Grammarcontent.htm

Internet TESL Journal's Crossword Puzzle links
There are so many crossword puzzle pages in this site, that I decided to include the page of links to the crosswords. Teachers should read through the list and decide which theme, topic, or level is appropriate to their individual needs. The results of this self-access searching could then be communicated through the discussion area of this web.

http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/links/ESL/Games/Crossword_Puzzles/

Create Your Own Newspaper

http://crayon.net/

Humanising Language Teaching Ezine

An online magazine (e-zine) with a varitey of topics of interest to EFL teachers. Back issues are also available online. Includes editorial, major articles, short articles, ideas, lessons, student voices...

http://www.pilgrims.co.uk/hlt/

Impact Online

Welcome to Impact! Online, an interactive news magazine for intermediate and advanced ESL/EFL students. This web site features articles about current events, health, sports and entertainment, etc. In each article, certain words are highlighted. If you click on any of these words, you will be linked to a explanation page for that word.Some of these pages feature audio files, which will teach you how to pronounce the word

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/Impact/

Index of Online Newspapers

From here you can find most online newspaper website from around the world. The site has a very easy to use directory for selecting by country.

http://www.webwombat.com.au/intercom/newsprs/

Sports Illustrated for Kids
Sports Illustrated for kids.

http://www.sikids.com/

Cloze Excercises

Fill each of the numbered boxes in the following passage with one suitable word. Use the TAB key to go to the next box. When you have finished press the SEND button to have your answers checked.

http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/MATERIALS/Cloze/cloze.htm

Easy Vocabulary Quizzes with Pictures

These are intereactive JavaScript quizzes for students of English as a second language.
Perhaps native English-speaking children will find them fun, too.
Click the correct picture. You can use the RETURN key to close the alert window.

http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~itesls/vq/

Road Safety Project

The Road Safety Project falls into the category of the transversal theme "Vial". The Road Safety Project aims to encourage reading comprehension and expand
vocabulary, while developing online research skills.
The project contains the following:
Articles located in this site, including interactive comprehension exercises,
on-line aids and suggestions for classroom implementation.
Links to articles in other sites.
Ideas for guided research projects.

http://www.amalnet.k12.il/meida/english/road/engi0002.htm

The English Spelling Zone

Learn some basic spelling rules, then practice using them. Includes... Plural Nouns, [ed] and [ing] words, Comparatives and Superlatives

http://members.home.net/englishzone/spelling/spelling.html

Variety of Activities

Activities such as crosswords, reading comprehension, grammar, and matching excercises.

http://www.ctv.es/USERS/carmen/activities.htm

Virtual Language Centre: Reading
Reading excercises in using activities such as CLOZE, Comprehension, Jumbled Text

http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/reading.htm

The Internet Movie Database

The Internet Movie Database has the most complete and up-to-date data on all the movies that your students have watched, and will be watching for years to come. It is a great resource for information to meet the needs and interests of students... Read summaries of movie plots, find out about the actors, add your own information. Locate short movie trailers, solve arguments!!!

http://uk.imdb.com/

Aesop's Fairytales online

Our online collection of Aesop's Fables includes a total of 654+ Fables, indexed in table format, with morals listed. There are many more on the way. Most were translated into English by Rev. George Fyler Townsend (1814-1900) and Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) the rest are from Jean De La Fontaine in French and translated to English by several good internet souls. Included are Real Audio narrations, Classic Images, Random Images, Random Fables, Search Engine, Message Forum and much more on the way. Recently added are 127 Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen with 209 Grimms Fairy Tales coming soon along with much more mythology and stories for your reading pleasure.

http://www.pacificnet.net/~johnr/aesop/

Caroline's ESL Website

There are a copy of well presented texts for students to read and then answer questions. The questions are all multiple choice and the page automatically provides a score for the student.

http://members.aol.com/Ccochran50/reading.htm

OZ Reading Comprehension Page

Read the passage and then complete the exercise that follows. This page includes a number of reading texts, many related to Australian culture, all with quizzes that provide instant feedback on the student's performance.

http://www.powerup.com.au/~ozesl/quiz7.html

Mag's Word Finder

Ever wondered how many words you could make out of the letters in your name? Choose a dictionary, type in a word or phrase, and fire away! There is also a list of other word games on the web

http://it.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~mag/cgi-bin/findwords/

Spelling Rules

Spelling rules are there. The site will not win any awards for visual design, but it has the most common rules.

http://server.riverdale.k12.or.us/~bblack/spelrul.htm

Gav and Peloso's Interactive Story

This is a moderated choose-your-own-adventure type of story where you get to write the story, and follow the story as it grows (and takes up much needed hard drive space.) You can even copy down the story location and come back to it later to see how it's grown.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/gav/wayfarence/

Guide to Grammar and Writing

An advanced level online set of pages with excellent material for students or for teachers to develop into lessons for their students. You have permission to use parts of this site for your course work, and the author claims that changes are made practically daily. Some of the topics of particular interest include: Sentence, Paragraph, and Essay writing tips, rules, and detailed information. In addition, there are a large number of links related to learning grammar.

http://webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/original.htm

International Writing Exchange

Started in 1993, this fast became the most popular collaborative writing activity of the HUT Email Writing Project, largely due to it's firm yet flexible structure.

It's a flexible communicative project, with students writing to and receiving feedback from their global peers as well as their teacher.

The 5 main phases of each module are:

Introductory letter with teacher feedback, and student's revised version
Article on a topic, e.g., Love and Marriage
Peer feedback 1, author's response, 3 , 4 and 5
Teacher feedback, followed by self-study, e.g., with Help Pages and XE demo, and exercises created by class teacher and peers
Virtual conference in HUT Virtual Language Centre

Evaluation and selection for IWE Journal

http://www.hut.fi/~rvilmi/Project/IWE/

Nancy Drew Myster Site

Includes on-line mysteries, discussion group, game and lesson plans

http://www.nancydrew.com/kids/

Paragraph Punch Website

This web site is designed to help users learn how to write a basic paragraph. This is a free online lesson based on our popular Windows 95/98/NT application, Paragraph Punch.

Users develop an idea and write their own topic sentence, body, and conclusion. Program prompts guide students step by step through pre-writing, writing, organizing, editing, rewriting, and publishing.

Students™ completed paragraphs can be transferred to a word processing program, HTML editor, or e-mail application

http://www.paragraphpunch.com/

The King's Road Writing Project

The King's Road Project is still in its embryo stage and we are searching for funding, but it is already very dear to the writer s heart, and embodies the words she has had in her signature for years,Involve me and I ll learn . The writer feels strongly that the Internet should be integrated with all other activities. Students should have ample opportunities to express themselves in all kinds of ways, to communicate orally as well as in writing, and to have fun together.

The Travelling Theatre and Adventure Game Activity

The basic idea of the project is to use the King s Road, which runs through four countries from St. Petersburg in Russia to Oslo in Norway (through Finland and Sweden) as the basis for all kinds of activities both physical and virtual. For example, in the year 2000, it is hoped that there will be a travelling theatre group , from England, starting at one end of the road.The group of British actors will work with students at each educational institution, helping to create, act out and later to record on the Internet, in English, a collaborative story. The theme of the story will continue throughout the journey. For example, the Russian students will create a story, e.g, in St.Petersburg. The story will be written down and put onto the Internet; a summary will be put there on the same day. Then , the next school along the road will have to read that story before creating and acting out the next instalment. These students, in turn, will write their summary on the Internet for the following institution to read, and so on, all the way to Oslo, through four countries. The students will later rewrite the story in good English, and may wish to add suitable pictures, sounds or even video clips. Eventually, the whole story will be put into an adventure game being made by software enginering students from Helsinki University of Technology.

http://www.hut.fi/~rvilmi/King/

The Quotations Page

This page was originally developed as a catalog of Quotation resources on the Internet; it has since evolved into a large-scale Quotation site with many original resources.

http://www.starlingtech.com/quotes/

The Student Showcase

The student showcase is an electronic magazine, containing articles and
prose written by high school students.

Although minor changes may have been made, the materials contained
herein have not been professionally edited, and may contain errors in syntax
or usage as they appeared in the students' original submissions.

Materials have been organized by content for easier browsing.Feature Articles
Are You Stupid?
Cigarette Smoking: A bad or a good thing?
Drugs: Should we or shouldn't we?
Stop the Bloodshed
They are Not Different
Tattoos
To Serve or Not to Serve (That is the question)

http://www.amalnet.k12.il/meida/english/showcase/engi0026.htm

The Writing Den

WritingDEN has seven basic aims. They are:

to improve writing skills and the ability to write a variety of essays
to develop communication skills
to expand vocabulary
to foster knowledge of a variety of cultural, historical and scientific topics
to increase visual literacy
to improve English pronunciation
to expand comprehension skills and critical thinking abilities
to use computers and the Internet to support the objectives of the 1996 Information Technology curriculum

http://www2.actden.com/writ_den/menu.htm

These are also useful links to term paper writing sites that can help you along the way. There are at least a hundred people out there who want to help you become better writers and students if you just seek them out; these have not been checked recently for activity so please let me know if you find any dead links:

http://www.yukoncollege.yk.ca/~agraham/guides/termpaper.htm

http://facstaff.uww.edu/goldblud/citations.html

http://www.unm.edu/~jporter/guide.html

http://www.isqa.unomaha.edu/wolcott/PaperGuidelines.htm

http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/

http://ipl.si.umich.edu/div/teen/aplus/

Google Scholar.

Google now offers a scholarly research engine, "Google Scholar"; while it is still in beta testing, it appears to work very well.
http://scholar.google.com/

Questia.

This is one of the premier online research resources available today. Bite the bullet and sign up for this service right now... you'll be glad you did every time you complete an assignment. Students who use Questia have been shown to receive grades two points higher than before (or something like that). This is the best one available ... and they aren't even paying me to say that. The service is kinda flaky with AOL in the middle of the night for some reason though; if you hook up with Explorer, that usually fixes it.

http://www.questia.com/

Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Online

Like the famous CD Rom, only online and free. Has map indexes, subject categories (physical sciences, life sciences, geography, social sciences etc.). This is where a lot of students get answers for homework assignments and/or projects.

http://encarta.msn.com/

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Please add more links that you have found useful; also, please let me know about any broken links. Thanks! -- Professor Verb

[Dixie]

Wow that's too much info Thank you very much, ProfessorVerb. I will take a look at those sites when I have time. Thanks again!

[shokin]

Thank you very much !

Will I have time to visit all !

Shokin

[Lalee]

Thank you very much !

Will I have time to visit all !

Shokin

I was wondering the same thing, Shokin.

And ProfessorVerb, thanks for the links.

[maryalber]

I have read this toppic too late, but it still makes sense for people like me are learning English.
because I think English is never old.
Thank you very much !

[tomnyblu]

Thank you for the useful pages
I feel funeasyenglish.com also a page or you should consult

[EnglishJ]

What an incredible list - this must have taken you some time to research and write; I'm going to go through the different websites you posted to see if there is anything that I can share with my students. There are so many different resources online that it can be quite overwhelming. It's important to know what works with you and stick with a certain plan.

My website has some grammar resources and I write some interesting dialogues and other posts to help with grammar, vocabulary and understanding. For example, I write about the past simple and then include lots of different stories and exercises to help you practice.