Writers' Workshop ESL Resources

The Center for Writing Studies, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Academic ESL Departments
ESL News, Journals, and Forums
Fun ESL Sites and Chatboards

:: Academic ESL Departments
: Intensive English Language Center at University of Nevada at Reno
This site provides a variety of ESL resources and links. There's nothing intrinsically new here, but the site is very well maintained, and most of the newest resources on the web are documented. There's also a penpal service and a few help manuals.

: ESL Department of Washington State University
This site provides links to many other free Internet services and is designed for both learners and teachers. It also connects the user with the home pages of other academic institutions dealing with ESL.

: University of Oregon's Yamada Language Learning Center
This site has a broad spectrum of ESL resources.
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:: ESL News, Journals, and Forums
: EFLWEB Home Page
A well-maintained commercial site providing a regularly updated ESL journal, a jobs forum, and an ESL schools directory.

: TESL-EJ journal
This is an electronic ESL journal, with access to back issues.
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:: Fun--But Useful--ESL Sites and Chatboards
: Dave's ESL Cafe on the Web
This site provides online help (including a daily Q & A) for both ESL students and teachers, a jobs forum, lunacy, graffiti, and so on.

: Linguistic Funland TESL Page
This comprehensive site includes activities, discussion groups, job opportunity listings, student projects, and more.

: The Compleat Lexical Tutor
This is a site for English (and French) vocabulary learning developed by Tom Cobb at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

: Diana Hacker Handbooks
This is a useful site for both students and instructors, and provides free grammar and writing exercises.

: English as a Second Language
A well-maintained site, periodically updated by Rong Chang Li. You must have a soundcard and some kind of sound engine on your machine to get the best use out of this page. The following sections are featured on this site:

Integration of Reading, Listening and Speaking Skills
A number of articles and games that also use the sound player. The most useful portion is probably the hypercard exercise on plurals, but you must have hypercard installed on your machine. A phrase book of sorts gives access to common sentences in English.

Listening and Speaking
A listening page, where you can download recordings and texts, and read along with what you hear. A scenario with three actors ("Going to the Dentist's Office") is amusing and the .html based text means that you can listen to any sentence in the short exchange as many times as you like.

English
A real phrase book, brightly illustrated with national flags, provides assistance for native speakers of German and French. Every word can be downloaded as a soundfile to your soundplayer, simply by clicking on it. The phrase book is quite large, and provides written translations of each word/phrase into German and French.

Talk Radio
This provides the user with a large selection of American NPR radio articles. They're each a minute or two long and not really for the rank ESL beginner. Texts don't seem to be provided.

Video Clips
This is actually for high school students of technology and science, but the video clips provide speeches etc. The files take some time to download, and remember you will have to have a video player installed on your machine.
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