I'm still waiting for replies to this story about getting toes run over by a friend's truck (very American) - it seemed like humor that many could appreciate, but since no one is replying I'm not so sure...
But we do have an English learner using humor in this thread about Korean women being mistaken for lesbians (read the one where they pretended to be lesbians to avoid men).
Just a quick announcement - I published a new class on ESL go. I think this class which uses vocabulary items in an interesting context - the popularity of computer games in South Korea - should be interesting for a lot of students. The language should be authentic though it may be a bit formal (like a newspaper).
Let me know what you think?
Warning: foul language and sexual content. Sounds strange for an English school commercial but there you go.
Now that I'm finally on vacation, I was able to complete a project I've been working on for a few months now. ESL go.com's click to donate function is a button on the homepage. Click the button (upper left side) and you'll be taken to the advertiser's page. The advertisers then make a small contribution to purchasing food for hungry people. Go click please! Only one click/day is recorded and if you like, you can register. If you click while logged in you can keep track of how much you donate.
Another criminal teacher in America. Perhaps I shouldn't judge so quicly (innocent until proven guilty) but teachers have to know better, don't they?
So a friend of mine who created Vocaboly vocabulary software has a new self help page at his site. In general, I think the most important way to help yourself is to set goals. I've written down short and long-term goals and that makes me committed to them. I think that has helped me get up from in front of the TV (numerous times) and go do some work that would help me achieve the goals I've set for myself.
Next in importance for me comes health and fitness. I just got a little Macmillan book with their words of the year. One of them was healthspan. Think lifespan, but shorter. Your healthspan are the years you're healthy. Have more healthy years.
Of course, English teachers have to consider career and financial success. Ours isn't exactly a get rich profession, so we need to make something happen in that regard by starting businesses, investing, etc.
I was happy to see this emerging friendship on my message board. This is the sort of relationship that could really motivate each person to use their English. I mean a Thai person living in Canda and a person from iran can really teach each other a lot about their respective cultures.
Here's a potentially valuable resource for ESL instructors and individual home learners: Light Up Your Brain was designed as a site for children, but also features some classic stories read by a professional voice talent. In addition to the audio version of the stories (either streaming or downloadable MP3), there's a link to the story text so you can read along visually. Among the story selections are The Emperor's New Clothes, The Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Mermaid.
Which click to doante sites do you trust? Freedonation.com claims on their "how it works" page:
FreeDonation.com is a web site with the mission of making the world a better place. At FreeDonation.com, you can make donations free of charge to important causes such as AIDS and cancer research, food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, vaccines for children and more. All you have to do is to click on the donation button and our sponsors will pay for your donation. The entire process takes only a few seconds.
Our sponsors pay a few cents every time you donate. While this does not sound like a large amount of money, a few cents will provide a cup of food for a hungry person or vaccinate a young child against tuberculosis. With each free donation, you will be making a real difference in someone's life.
Well which is it? A few cents or about a fraction of a cent (about a fraction? - never heard that before). Finally, the "sponsors" are affilaite links. With affiliate links the web site gets paid when someone makes a purchase. This leads me to believe that your click does absolutely nothing unless you buy from one of the sponsors.
I found some interesting material here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/about.shtml
There are some interesting resources, including one on teaching critical thinking in the teacher's section.
One of my short term goals is to build a "click to donate site" like ecologyfund.com or theungersite.com. I don't have time to learn how to code one, so I will need to hire a designer to take care of everything. To raise money for the project I'm opening ESL Ad store, an Amazon store. Basically, people can browse Amazon products and when they buy something from Amazon after following a link from ESL Ad, Amazon gives me a small commission. This goes into my "click to doante" web design fund. The best part is that prices stay the same so no one has to pay extra to help fund the future ESL charity site.
Someone claiming to be Howie and using email@internationaleflcafe.com has been spamming my ESL go fourms. What's with these ESL web site owners and spam? I mean spam will not make an ESL site successful. Anyway, I suggest avoiding this internatioanleflcafe site and of course the old markesl or whatever site. I've had spam problems with both of these guys.
I remember reading a while back about the cultural differences involved in the labor dispute between Citibank and the Korea labor unions. I've found a couple of articles about it, but not ones that really concentrate on the cultural aspects. I'm thinking this would be a great issue to discuss in my Business across Cultures class...
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2004-July/031307.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FG03Dg01.html
Sponsored by Pets for Sale, a good place to advertise extra dogs and cats.
I'm updating my ESL and EFL friendly blogs directory to make it easier to maintain. Let me know what you think and feel free to add your blogs if you want comments from English learners.
This is a site I have to do a better job promoting because I think these blogs provide an excellent opportunity for practice with native speakers.
Sponsored by Autos for Sale, a good place to look for used cars.
Here are some sites with educational information on various subjects. I hope you enjoy learning about:
I found a web site called Connect Korea that has lots of links to various news articles from English newspapers and bloggers in Korea. Their mission:
Welcome to Connect Korea. An online Korean media source connecting foreigners to Korea. We hope our community and media will keep Koreans and foreigners up to date about Korean culture and issues.
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on my new navigation/coloschme on the ESL go forums? Eventually I'll get this new scheme on every page in the site, but it may take some time...
When I started this blog I got some interesting comments like the ones on teaching reading from a while back.
But now all the comments seem to be coming from spammers. Most are about poker or worse. If anyone here will be offended if I remove comments from this blog, please leave a comment here.
Introducing the ESL go language directory. It's a directory of web sites for language learners, langauge teachers, translators, linguists, and educators of all kinds. Categories include:
English writing and editing services - Sites that do your writing for you (if you pay).Category suggestions are welcome and link suggestions can be made by following the "submit new link" at the top of each category.ESL products for sale - Sites where you can buy various English learning products
Introduction to TESOL - Advice for new teachersLanguage schools English - Schools where you can study English
Language schools Italian - Schools where you can study ItalianLanguage schools Spanish - Schools where you can study Spanish
Legal advice - Sites that try to help teachers in troubleLesson resources - Sites with lesson plans, speaking activities, and handouts
Practice using English - Message boards, pen pals, chats, and other sites where you can use English to communicate.Study English grammar online - Web sites that help you learn English grammar
Study English reading - Sites that will help you become a better readerStudy English vocabulary online - Web sites that help you learn English vocabulary
Study English writing - Sites that will help you become a better writerTeacher blogs - Blogs that are often but not always related to English language teaching.
Teacher education - Sites for teacher development & trainingTeacher jobs - Sites where language teachers can search for jobs
Teaching specific skills and systems - Ideas for teaching pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, speaking, listneing, reading, and writingTranslation - Companies offering translation services
University information - Information about degree programs in various subjectsUniversity information distance learning - Information about degree programs available via distance learning
I want as many people as possible to read ESL blog, so I'm starting a link trading campaign. If you have an Education related site, request a reciprocal link via e-mail: eslblog {at} eslgo {dot} com (link to http://www.esl-blog.com/, send me an e-mail telling me where the link is, I'll look at your site and, if it's appropriate, link to it from this page).
Categorized ESL and education links for teachers with comments
English language teaching links with comments
ESL go - TESOL TESL TEFL resources - Speaking activities (role-plays, information gaps, find someone who..., oral assessment rubric); Business English handouts (writing business letters and e-mails, needs analysis); and lesson plans
(Communicative speaking/listening ones). This is my site.
KOTESOL CALL SIG - Computer assisted language learning in Korea. I facilitate this SIG.
Developing Teachers - Articles, lesson plans, and forums (which I sometimes use).
Music to teach ESOL - Songs that can be used to help English learners.
Teaching in Japan? Want Students? - Teachers in Japan may use this free service to get private students. Your online profile is browsed by students in your area. Set your own rates / schedule / workplace.
ESL Jobs, TEFL Jobs, TESOL Jobs - Jobs worldwide in ESL/TEFL/TESOL. Contains career-related information, lesson plans, activities and related resources. Completely
free but some pop ups and pop unders.
General Education teaching links with comments
Literacy Connections - Resources for teaching reading. Useful for ESL but not restricted to ESL.
Language and linguistics links with comments
Blinger: a linguistics + ESL blog - An EFL teacher's thoughts on language and teaching.
Translation - Language translation by human translators. High quality translation at excellent prices.
Blog links with comments
The Intern's Journal - Journals by Interns at Vancouver English Centre, in Vancouver, Canada.
directories
Education - Universities, research, math, history and other related topics.
I just added two web pages to ESL go.com. They are both for practice with transition words. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.
Business transitions.
5-HTP transitions.
I'm starting a CALL - CMC - cross cultural communication blog in which maybe 10 or so authors would blog occasionally about their experiences using CALL. The application process won't be time consuming, but if interested you will have to send me an email about your CALL experience past and present. It shouldn't be long, but should convince me you have had and will have some experiences worth sharing.
I recently set up a vocabulary message board, where English learners can work together to create a big online vocabulary journal. A colleague of mine and I have been sending students to the site for homework in hopes that getting a bunch of examples of how a word can be used will help learners increase active vocabulary.
However, we didn't anticipate some things that learners have done. I suppose it's no surprise that our students don't intuitively know how to organize an online vocabulary journal, but some of the things they've done are really surprising.
For example, I've got students starting a thread with a post about four different words. I envisioned one word per thread so if you want to study the word status, you don't have to read about a bunch of other words as well.
I've also got students starting new threads all the time. I must have 5 different threads with the word "status". If all those examples were in one place it would be a valuable source of information.
I think in the future this message board will really help people, and everyone is welcome to use it with their classes. We just have to be careful to make sure learners use it in the way that will benefit them the most.
Since my classes are just about over, I've been thinking "how can I help my students remember/use all the language we've studied?" I came up with this present perfect, past perfect, past pregressive review. Please tell me what you think!
Remember me complaining about tesall.com? Well, this time I actually got what I wanted. They are going to revise the old format of their list of blogs but the plan to rank sites based on traffic has been scrapped. This makes me feel good and I'm adding tesall.com to the list of sites I like.
Speaking of traffic, thank you for reading evryone. I've been averaging about 100 different readers/day (468 hits/day) and almost none of them come from search engines or other web sites... One fo these days I'll start a link building campaign...
And still speaking (more) of traffic, please visit a sponsor, Custom Hats . Custom embroidery superstore sells custom hats and custom caps.
So I posted a few messages a few months ago looking for classes that were discussing the death penalty. The idea was to have students in another country discussing the death penalty with my students on my death penalty message board. The benefits: if students organize their thoughts in order to post to a message board before a class discussion, this planning time will help students produce more accurate and complex language the second time around (see Martin Bygate's research on task repetition). After the class discussion, students might be motivated to continue communicating with the other class, especially if the members of one class post their messages in response to members of the other class (If everyone just starts a new thread there's no real interaction going on). More English practice.
This could work for any of my English practice message boards. For example students could disuss the attractions in their own countries and respond with questions about attractions in other countries on the travel message baord. Or after the first day of class, more practice with introductions on the say "hi" message board. If you have a class that's doing a topic not listed on my message boards, just leave a comment and tell me which topic you'd like me to add. Then you can look for another class to share ideas with your class.
I won't link to it because soon it will be a broken link, but http://www.tesall.com/bloglog.html is a list of ESL / EFL blogs. However their switching to an annoying format, where users have to create an account and link back to tesall.com (I counted over 15 ads on their index page). From their e-mail: The reason is simple: the top sites format is more engaging and effective.
I don't think so. The top sites format ranks sites based on how much traffic they bring to tesall.com. This format encourages us bloggers to place ugly tesall.com banners prominently on our sites in order to get the #1 ranking. Whoever sends them the most visitors (whoever makes them the most money) wins and gets a #1 ranking. No way am I joining that list. I'll make my own list of ESL & EFL teacher blogs.
If we all link to each other, we don't need tesall.com.
Marcus's Journal A personal blog from an EFL teaching friend.
The LongBow Papers - Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news and political events--with emphasis on China.
anglosaxy - A Brit's insight into life in the Holy Land...teaching, writing, drinking and anything else in the present continuous...
Me in Taiwan - Daily Blog about life in Taiwan as a foreigner teaching English. I spare no topic. SARS, toilet paper, tampons... all the info I had trouble finding when I was researching Taiwan as a home for a year!
Anna Overseas - A Canadian learning about Chinese culture and language while teaching in Jiangsu Province.
An Enlgishman in Verona - The adventures, musings and photos of an English teacher in Verona, Italy.
Scot's Dot - Technology and English language training, with a Macintosh bent.
Blog-efl - Blog for teachers interested in blogging with their classes.
China Hand - A description of daily life plus thoughts on greater issues in China from Huizhou, China by a long term China Hand.
Welcome to Dalian - Adventures of a Chinese-Canadian teaching, experiencing, learning and trekking around Dalian.
Travelitch - Travel & life in Korea and beyond. Over 98.6% Subjective.
TESOL Blog - This is the Blog of a wonderful group of TESOL postgraduate students at the University of Melbourne. Everydoby is welcome to send posts and comments!
seeing eye blog - The least intellectual Korea-based blogger since 2003.
Ruminations in Korea - Views on Life, Korea, the Universe, and Everything From a Tired, Old Man of 34.
The Rhialto - Report from Air-Conditioned Hovel No61.
Peking Duck - A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him...
The Laowai Monologues - An American teacher's accounts of teaching and living and struggling in a small city and a small college in China. Entries are long and detailed. Realistic, not promotional.
Korea Life - Enjoy reading about my experiences living and teaching in South Korea. Please leave comments.
Nevada in Taiwan - Hello..How are you?....I'm fine thank you, and you? Beleive it or not teaching English has diminished my ability to speak English.
frangipani - An Australian woman woke up on Christmas Day 2002 and found herself living at the foot of Mt Fuji, teaching English. Lots of lovely photos and.... a few words.
EFL in Japan - The politics, economics, education and environment of EFL in Japan.
Doom in China - A blithe account of my time in Haikou, Hainan P.R.C.
Brainylady - Dealing with a knitting obsession, one day at a time.
bjorn's web log - An Anglophile Swede's view of the Middle East, books and TEFL.
The Big Electric Kurva - A blog about me and the Koreans.
alive in kyoto - Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.
An English as a second language weblog - ESL news, reviews, opinions, and links regarding learning and teaching English as a second language and English as a foreign language.
Bee-coming a Webhead - Comments/ Links/Ideas on Blogging and Learning Online.
Where is the love? - Italian EFL students bloggin' about peace.
On English - Gentle help for those who are struggling to master the English language, and a good read for those who think they do.
touchy issues - A running commentary on touchy issues relating to ESL teachers in Taiwan.
Blinger: A linguistics and ESL blog - I am a practicing ESL or EFL instructor at a university in Seoul, South Korea. I will be writing about my thoughts regarding how linguistic theory can or should be transformed into practice and any difficulties that are likely to occur.
First Conditional - An English teacher blogs from Spain. Stories from the classroom and the staffroom.
byoi in hong kong - Young American writer calls Hong Kong home for his travels and experiences.
If you know of any more ESL or EFL teacher blogs, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail.
The web site marksesl.com sent me an e-mail the other day requesting a reciprocal link with ESL go. Now I'm not suggesting you visit markesl, but if you do you'll a ton of advertisements (annoying pop up ads included) and a ton of links. Here's what they promised for my site if I linked to them:
* Properly categorized in its own section.
* Reviewed for possible improvement of its description.
* A big "Wow" image will be added.
....
If you link to me from your main page, I will add an "A" in
front of your site's name so as to alphabetize your site at the top of
its list.
This site actually competes with ESL go for search engine traffic! Maybe some day search engines will be able to tell the difference between teachers who build web sites to help people (me) and teachers who build web sites to display as many ads as possible (Mark's ESL).
I've been working to reorganize ESL go because I'm outgowing my original plans. I started a year ago (less actually) with 8 classes. Now I have 40 free online English classes. I just divided them into high beginner lessons, intermediate lessons, and advanved lessons.
The classes are designed to be short demonstrations of how language is used followed by a chance to practice English communication on message boards. Any comments on how to make the classes better are very welcome.
A downloadable cloze generator. You could do the same text different ways (every 4 words, every 5 words, every 6 words, etc.) and students could choose which one they wanted to try. Then students could check the answers by themselves because between them they have all the words.
I've recently started a new web site: Blogs for learning English & teaching English. The feedback I've gotten so far has been very positive, but I'd certainly love to hear more. The basic premise is that students can communicate with native speakers about topics they find personally interesting through weblogs with comments.
To that end I've been emailing bloggers and asking if they would welcome comments from English learners. When I get a postive response, I add the blog to my directory of ESL & EFL friendly blogs.
A few other intersting resources for blogging: http://blog-efl.blogspot.com/ is a blog about blogging in EFL. http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Campbell-Weblogs.html is an article that discusses learner blogs, class blogs, and tutor blogs. I created my site around a fourth kind, normal blogs (blogs written for purposes other than education).
English page claims to be creating an online grammar book with descriptions, lessons, etc. But they reject a perfectly good lesson that meets all the criteria they list for possibly rejecting a site. Instead, English page has put only their own sites in the future perfect chapter of the grammar book; lots of drills with no context. Why is online language learning stuck on decontextualized grammar drills? I think that englishpage is creating this grammar book not to help students, but to make money. Why else would they reject my perfectly good lesson but include their shabby drills?
Why not read the rejection letter and check my future perfect class out for yourself. Tell me what you think. Am I wrong?
We would like to thank you for submitting the link:
http://www.eslgo.com/classes/business/credibility.html
submitted on 20-Jan-2004. This link has been considered by our staff. If we
choose not to accept this particular link, it will be for one of the
following reasons:
1. Content is not a grammar description or lesson.
2. Duplicate URL
3. Errors in content
4. Errors in interactivity
5. Content cannot be evaluated because it is not in English.
Remember that we are trying to create an online grammar book. We are
looking for grammar lessons, grammar descriptions, grammar reference
materials, or online grammar tools. General ESL sites or non-grammar
content will not be accepted.
There are some sites which can not be contacted:
www.eslpartyland.com - the e-mail given, karin@eslpartyland.com hasn't worked for over a month now. According to the home page, it hasn't been updated since 2001!
www.eslmag.com - info@eslmag hasn't worked for over a month now
The web links on www.eslcafe.com aren't up to date. At the 2003 KOTESOL conference Dave himself said "Don't use my links; it's a mess". So why keep it online?
Very annoying.
Children's Storybooks Online Talking eBooks looks like an excellent resource for teaching children. Their description (their words; I haven't personally used any of their products):
Every individual word is clickable to hear in our eBooks! Engaging stories, colorful illustrations, full narration to hold a child's (or adult's) attention while helping them to read and pronounce English. Short stories for beginning readers and longer stories (thousands of clickable words) for intermediate readers. Only $2.50-$3.50. Instantly downloadable.
A Christmas board game: http://www.onestopenglish.com/News/Magazine/Vocab/worksheets/xmas_speaking_b.pdf and lesson plan: http://www.onestopenglish.com/News/Magazine/Vocab/worksheets/xmas_speaking.pdf
Some Christmas discussion questions: http://www.eslgo.com/resources/sa/discussion/christmas.html
Printable Christmas vocabulary worksheet: http://www.englishpage.com/holidays/christmasprintable.html
Check out this homework assignment and tell me if you think it was written by an intermediate English learner. Of course it wasn't!
The search term "promotes murder for murder" turns up one Google result: http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/2164.html.
An exact match. If you find yourself facing an obviously plagiarised paper, and cases of plagiarism are usually easy to spot in ESL classes, put a distinct sounding phrase in quotes and do a google search. Note that the quotes are very important. The term promotes murder for murder without quotes returns lots of pages. With quotes returns only one.
Linguist List - Ask A Linguist Index Page is a great web site! I was correcting some quizzes and the first three I looked at had "... are showed" as an answer. As I marked the third one wrong I said "Wait a minute! The past participle could be showed": Have you showed him the pictures? I get my dictionary: showed or shown. I get the teachers book: shown. I do a web search and find this Ask a linguist site. It turns out someone asked my question back in 1998. In the active shown and showed are both possible. In the passive, it has to be "shown". I just wish I'd told my students before the quiz...
I suppose the first blog entry has to be about my site, ESL go - English as a second language learning and teaching. I started the site because so many ESL learning sites are grammar drills leftover from my high school Latin class. I mean we'd never use these activities in a communicative classroom, so why do we put them on the web and call it educational? My site is different and the Free online ESL classes are all contextualized and they all lead to interaction on the English practice forums.