ESL / TEACHING LINKS
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Below are links to various ESL and teaching resources to help you create a personalized learning program for you and your student.
General Resources
This list of online resources includes links to a wide range of sites. Topics included are: lesson plans, games, worksheets, podcasts, multimedia sites, ESL civics, grammar, interviews and more.
Making It Real: Teaching Pre-Literate Adult Refugee Students
This book reviews some effective practices for teaching preliterate adult refugees. It describes techniques and activities that support these practices. It is divided into sections on teaching, speaking, and listening skills and reading and writing skills. Each of the sections on teaching language skills provides examples and descriptions of useful approaches, techniques, and activities. There is a checklist of language competencies that learners who are new to the language need to know, a section on teaching multi-level groups, and information on resources that teachers and service providers can use.
The Spring Institute
The Spring Institute provides many useful teaching materials for working with literacy level students and resources for working with students who have experienced trauma.
USCIS
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (formerly the INS) website has information about taking the citizenship exam, test questions, and on-line application and change of address forms.
About.com ESL guide
An good resource for teachers. Includes lesson plans, job opportunities, games to help pronunciation, grammar and creative writing. Site has a wide variety of materials but it is sometimes hard to download.
The Linguistic Funland TESL Page: Resources for ESL/EFL Teachers
A basic site for searching for information about teaching and learning English. Not much original information because the site is primarily a search engine and links page.
Dave's ESL Cafe
This is one of the largest ESL resource sites. Much of it is advertising for Dave's own products, but the Idiom Page, ESL Quiz Center, and ESL Slang Page are good references. For teaching inspiration, the Idea Page contains tips from tutors all over the world about teaching grammar, getting to know people, etc. The only problem is that some of these suggestions are only useful for teaching a group of students.
IOM Nepal - Life Book
IOM Nepal has developed a "Life Book" for use with refugees from Bhutan and would like to make it available to others who may find it useful in their work with refugees. A Life Book is a psychosocial support tool to help refugees say goodbye to their home and help them resettle in their new home.
PIE (Parent Involvement in Education) Reader
This reader is a life-skills course designed to teach both language and socio-cultural skills needed by adult refugees and immigrants to help their children succeed in school.
Unit 1: Filling out School Forms
Unit 2: Parent-Teacher Meetings
ERIC - Trauma and Adult Learning
This resource discusses individual responses to trauma, its effects on learning, and ways in which educators can respond. Published by Educational Resources Information Center.
Adolescent Literacy
This article on the website adlit.org discusses how to motivate reluctant adolescent readers.