TED Talks - Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen

Another great video from TED Talks about listening.



Word cloud of the TED Talk video. 

Word Cloud made with Wordle.net

TED Talks - Julian Treasure : 5 ways to listen better

Listening is a very important skill in learning English. From the TED website, is a nice video about listening by Julian Treasure. 



Now here is a word cloud which shows the words used by Julian Treasure in this TED video. Cool, isn't it?

Word Cloud made with ABCYA

3 Wonderful Things About ELLLO

If you want to practise your listening and comprehension skills, English Language Listening Lab Online (ELLLO) is a great site to bookmark. This free site contains hundreds of listening activities with short quizzes to test your comprehension. While you listen you have the option to show or hide the text. The text version also offers audio explanations of difficult words and phrases. ELLLO's mp3 recordings are unique in that they offer English accents of people from all over the world, including America, Canada, Britain, Australia, and countries where English is not a first language. Conversation topics, such as housing, relationships, and jobs are modern and practical in daily life. Listen on site or download your favorites and study English on the go. To sum it up, I found three wonderful things about ELLLO :
1. It's free.
2. There are hundreds of listening activities with short quizzes to test your comprehension. 
3. Conversation topics are modern and practical in daily life.


To know more about ELLLO, try to listen to Russell Stannard's tutorial which you can access here. 

Photo via michellehenry.fr

3 Wonderful Characters at StoryTimeForMe

Do you like reading books? Well, if you do, then you can try to check this amazing website, StoryTimeForMe.  This site is a free reading program for children in early elementary school which allows them to read and listen to enjoyable and  interactive picture books.  It also offers free personalized books where the child actually becomes the star of the story book. There are three(3) nice characters who have a series of stories in the website.  A bigger and even more awesome website to read children's books is the International Children's Digital Library. 

18 Fantastic Word Games from FunBrain

FunBrain is such an amazing website for kids as well as kids at heart! This website has a Math Arcade, Reading,Fun Arcade, Playground and one of my favorites is the Word Games.  Check out the 18 fantastic word games from FunBrain!

PhraseMix

PhraseMix  is one of my favorite websites for learning English phrases and natural English. There are thousands of  lessons to choose from and this site has so much content for English language learners. Try to always check out PhraseMix  and learn more about important English phrases and expressions.

Recent Lessons

PhraseMix.com is a site for learners who want to speak more natural English. Use this widget on your site.

The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English

One of my favorite ESL blogger is Larry Ferlazzo ; he is quite well-known for his blog, Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day.  Today, I'ld like to share his blog post, 'The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English' which shares a lot of websites about the best speaking sites there is in the Web for English Language learners (ELLs). You can access the list of speaking sites here.

Words in the News

Do you like watching the news? And what if it's news in  English? I hope you do because watching or listening to the news is one important skill you need to learn especially if you want to be proficient in English. Now here is one great BBC site on learning about the news. It's called Words in the News. Just click here to access it. Have a great Monday!

Words in the News

Tongue twisters

Tongue twisters is a fun way to learn and improve on your English pronunciation skills.  From the LearnEnglishKids website is a nice collection of tongue twisters which English learners can listen to and do practice saying them. You can access it  here.

Now watch Teacher Joe Deveto do some funny tongue twisters.

LingoFeeds

This post is for learners of professional English. Lingofeeds provides a unique guide to learning professional and business English. This very nice website has dialogues and key phrases taken from specific industries making the lessons very much relevant to learners.  Lingofeeds will surely improve your English using the English you need to improve your professional and business English skills.

Image via LingoFeeds

Image via talktocanada

Listen-and-Write

Listen-and-write is an online tool that allows you to practice your listening skills by listening to audio and transcribing it.  You can upload your own audio, or choose from a  list of audio files. This tool would be great for teachers and students of English language learners (ELLs) since it is a great way of practicing listening skills.  Here is a slide about how to use Listen-and-write.

Listen and write

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Lit2Go

Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in MP3 (audiobook) format. In this site English language learners(ELLs) can download the files to their MP3 player and listen on the go. They can also view the text on a webpage and read along as you  listen to the MP3 file. Stories and poems can also be printed out to make their own book. Out of the 1000's of audio books from this great site, here are a few of my favorites.

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Aesop's Fables
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• The Call of the Wild
• Heart of Darkness

• 
  

Taking a taxi

Voice of America News has a very nice page for English language learners. It is called "The Classroom" and here you can find "Activities" which is divided into Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced learners sections. In the Beginners section, is a nice lesson on "Taking a taxi" and "Getting a bus", which I think is very important to learn especially if you are in a foreign country. More online resources about taking a taxi can be found here in this link.

To learn more on how to get a taxi , like in New York City, USA, then watch this nice video. 

44 Sounds of English

Pronunciation in English is a very important skill. To help you with that here is a fun video about the 44 sounds of English. Now to learn more about American accent and pronunciation, check out "The Phonetics Flash Animation Project". 

How was your weekend?

It's Monday, August 6th. Last Friday, we talked about what you can say when asked "What are you going to do this weekend?". Now this time, lets practice on how to answer the question - "How was your weekend?"  To learn more about this, you can check, "Weekends - Asking about what people did?" and listen to audio file on talking about the weekend.  Also try to answer the fill-in-the-blanks drill in "How was your weekend?". 


Watch this video too and can you tell what they did last weekend?

What are you going to do this weekend?

It's Friday, August 5th, so it's nice to think about what you will say when asked "What are you going to do this weekend?". To learn more about this, you can check, "Invitation to a Movie", and listen to three audio files on talking about the weekend.  You can also try to to answer the 'Going to' drill in the a4esl website, another wonderful site for learning English. More drills on 'going to' can be found here. Have a great weekend!

Photo via typepad.com

Do you help at home?

What chores do you do at home? Do you help your mom or dad? Helping at home is a very important thing you can do to your family. For online resources on saying about home chores, you can visit these sites below.


3 exercises CHORES, by Irina
Find this and other daily routines exercises in English Exercises .org


HOUSEHOLD CHORES, by Isabel
Find this and other daily routines exercises in English Exercises .org


You can also download these worksheets from esltower.com, in a special 'box', I made for you. So hope you have fun and learn more about saying the chores that you do at home!





Here is a nice video about doing household chores.

Using the simple past

In English, when you say things about the past, you should use the simple past tense in your sentence.  But a lot of students of mine, especially beginners, are fond of saying 'go' when they should have said 'went'. From the website of EnglishClub is a nice lesson on using the simple past. To read it, just click here.  You can learn more about the structure and the use of the simple past tense. And you can also try their simple past quiz.

Using the simple past from EnglishClub.com

Now if you want to learn more about how to use the simple past tense, then you can also watch this very  informative video by Ellen Quish.  Have fun learning the simple past tense!

100 Lessons from EnglishSpeak

EnglishSpeak offers a lot of lessons for English language learners (ELLs). For one thing, it has '100 Lessons' which are actually audio recording of dialogs as spoken by native speakers and based on a real world conversations. It's a great set of lessons on key expressions for those who are serious students of English. 

Do You Speak English?

'Do You Speak English?', is a funny video from English Central. Watch it and I'm sure, you will smile! English Central is such a great and amazing website to practice every English student's speaking and pronunciation skills.