Amazing site specifically for adult basic skills students

This site contains many ready-made worksheets designed for adult ESL classes and basic education students. It can be slightly overwhelming because there is so much to see! I particularly looked under "ESOL Resources". If you click on either of the links below that, "Entry 1 ESOL" or "Entry 2 ESOL", you will find an amazing number of worksheets organized by one of the four skills. If you scroll down, you can see descriptions of the worksheets. You can also find literacy resources here.

Excellent site on L1-specific pronunciation and English dialects

The Speech Accent Archive is a really interesting site. It has speakers from all over the world and of many different L1s reading a passage aloud in English. I believe this passage is designed to showcase as many different segmental characteristics in English as possible. You can hear different speech samples if you click on the "language/speakers" link or the "atlas/regions" link, and you can see what sounds many different languages contain if you click on "native phonetic inventory". There are two main things I find useful:

1) If your students are having trouble understanding certain native English-speaking dialects, you can go to this page. You can hear a huge number of different accents.

2) If you as a teacher want to find out different problems students from different regions will have, you can click on the "language/speakers" link or the "atlas/regions" link and the site gives very specific issues students may have with English as well a sample of their speech.

Site for using comics in classroom activities

MAKE BELIEFS COMIX! is a great site to make your own comics. I have used it to practice different grammatical structures in a contextualized way. This site is great because there are several different characters with different facial expressions you can choose from, and also a variety of thinking and talking boxes. It is free and you can make comics in English and Spanish.

I realized the utility of this website after a day of trying to present substitution exercises in my class. (These are exercises in which there is a pre-made dialogue and the students just substitute in different vocabulary or phrases. I know they are generally looked down on and probably remind teachers too much of the audiolingual method, but I thought in limited amounts, it could help students automatize formulaic phrases while practicing vocabulary.) I thought these activities would be relatively simple because I had done them so often in my language classes. But I did not realize that if you were not used to the format, it is confusing what you are supposed to do and why you are having the conversation in the first place. After a very difficult class trying to explain a substitution drill, I decided to try comics. Comics provided a clear context and fun visuals. I think it was a much more successful and helpful activity than the drills.

Good communicative activities for younger learners

When looking at Kaki's blog about teaching Spanish, I found a site that I think teachers of any language would greatly benefit from. Online Resources for Teachers of Spanish has many different communicative activities listed for different units you would find in a beginner textbook. You need a little bit of Spanish to navigate the site because the tabs are in Spanish ("La comida", "El alfabeto"), but the descriptions are in English and it is pretty apparent what the unit is about once you click on the tab. The actual activity suggestions are for Spanish, but many of them involve things present in American culture, like Hangman and the song "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"). I think it would be pretty simple to get ideas from here and tailor them to whatever language classroom you're in.

A fun way to practice vocabulary and grammar- bingo cards

I have found using bingo cards to be useful in class: it is a fun, possibly interactive game, and it lends itself to being checked and therefore error correction, unlike other games.

I use bingo cards to either practice vocabulary or grammar. With vocabulary, the students are often just identifying words or pictures. For grammar, I generally have phrases like "                      wants to study business" or "                   wants to travel the world," if we were practicing "want to", for example. The students then have to walk around and find someone for whom each sentence is true. As a side note, I have also seen this used both in language classes and general meetings as a fun icebreaker.

Depending on how big your class is, there are two sites I would recommend:

1) Print-Bingo.com is the more convenient site, I believe, but you only get ten different cards. You type in the phrases or words you want, and there is always a free space in the center. Also, all the cards go straight to a PDF and you can just print them out.
2) Teachnology seems to give you an unlimited number of bingo cards, but they give you one at a time. I have copied and pasted the cards onto a Word document to print them out. Another issue is that the free space appears anywhere in the bingo cards, so that is different than a normal bingo game.

A community of ESL teachers; lots of worksheets and activities

ESL Printables strikes me as a great resource, even though I have not had much experience with it. You register on this website, which has a wealth of activities for ESL students. The interesting part is that in order for you to download other people's resources, you must contribute resources of your own. For every person that downloads something you upload, you get 1 point. With every point, you can download something from someone. I have not had a chance to upload an activities yet, but I look forward to being a part of this network of teachers.

Ordering food: good for practicing food vocabulary, ordering skills and basic computer skills

This is an activity that is inspired by Betsy's blog. Betsy posted an activity related to ordering shoes from the Nike site, and I thought an interesting related activity would be to order food online. This would be useful for practicing vegetable and meat vocabulary, since those are most of the toppings. Pizza Hut probably has the most straightforward site to use: the main page gives you a direct link to the online ordering page, and the directions are easy to follow from there. Domino's and Papa John's are a little more complicated: you would need to make sure your students click on the "Build your own pizza" option on the Domino's site and the "Create your own pizza" option on the Papa John's site. But these sites have the advantage of a much more fun and knowledge-cementing pizza-building experience: when you click on a topping, they fall onto a picture of the pizza.

As I said, this activity could be useful for practicing food vocabulary. It could also give students another tool to order food, since phone interactions are usually difficult. Speaking of phone interactions, an extension of this activity could be to call the pizza place and order a pizza once they are comfortable with all the options available online. Finally, I think these sites can be useful if your students are interested in improving their computer skills. Theses sites are easy to maneuver and the vocabulary should be pretty familiar to most adults in Community Ed classes (most people order pizza at some point and many of your students may have a Pizza Hut and Domino's in their home countries). It is a very practical activity, and students could maybe order a pizza for a class party.

Making E-cards: good for beginner students

This is an idea I found while looking at SparkEnthusiasm.com, a site Kaki listed on her blog. The makers of the site listed making e-cards as a way to practice Spanish, and I thought it would be useful for English as well. I think it could be great for true beginner students. You could help students figure out what goes into most greeting cards in the U.S., and then have them send each other cards. A site with free e-cards is 123 Greetings.

Some sites for using music in class

Here are some ways to find music to use in classes:

1. Musical English Lessons International, England- good for finding songs for grammar activities
This site seems very useful to me. It is arranged by grammatical category, and within each category are a few songs. When you click on a song, you get the grammatical activity related to that song plus other things you could practice with that song (different grammatical forms, pronunciation, spelling, etc.). I highly recommend this.

2.Songfacts- ok for finding songs for vocabulary activities
This site is limited in its usefulness, but it might be worth a shot. It categorizes songs based on what words they have in their title. So you can find songs with body parts or clothing or units of measurement, even, in the title. This is not an actual language learning website, though, and of course, having "sweater" in the title does not mean that the song will have clothing as its focus or list many different articles of clothing. However, this may be a good place to start looking. Also, it does not include the lyrics of the songs on the site, but those are easy enough to find on Google usually.

3. Isabel's ESL site- suggestions for activities that can go with different songs
This site has a list of popular songs, their lyrics and activities that could be done with each song. It might be somewhat time-consuming to go through all the songs to find one that deals with prepositions in the way you want it to, for example, but if you find that your students like a particular genre of music or a certain artist, this might be good.

4. Google and YouTube - finding songs for very specific words or structures
This might seem common sense, but it wasn't always to me. I was looking for songs specifically for "wanna" and "will" and I found two ways of doing this. With Google, I would type in the target word and then "lyrics", and several songs came up. For example, when I typed in "wanna lyrics", I found a Chris Brown song, a Spice Girls songs and an All-American Rejects song, along with others. With YouTube, I would type in the target word, and several songs would pop up. When I typed in "wanna", "wanna be a billionaire" by Travie McCoy and "wanna be a baller" by Lil Troy came up.

My purpose for this blog

The purpose for this blog is to provide resources to teachers working in ESL community education, especially teachers who have not had a lot of experience in this context. However, I imagine that the information in this blog could be useful to ESL or foreign language educators in general in a variety of contexts. My teaching context is an adult ESL night class in Texas. I love getting advice! I think the anecdotes and opinions of other teachers and students are the best resources in teaching. I would love your comments on the resources I post and definitely also on any personal accounts I put up as well. I definitely appreciate constructive criticism: my mindset right now is that I am learning to be a teacher, and I can very much use input from others. Any sort of well-thought out input is appreciated!

Welcome!

This blog is related to various aspects of teaching adult community education. I have just began teaching in this context, and I have realized what a unique challenge is. This blog will most especially reflect and respond to factors affecting the second language learning of these adults, particularly a busy life outside of class, strong motivation and limited prior schooling.

My hope for this blog is that it will be able to provide other teachers with resources to use in similar contexts. I plan for these resources to include activities and relevant personal anecdotes. I love hearing other people's opinions about these topics, so definitely leave comments if you have something to say!