Teaching Websites

The world wide web is the world's biggest resource - ESL/EFL teaching is no exception. In planning your own lessons, the internet can provide an invaluable hand in not just ideas, but also things like worksheets, printouts, flashcards, and more.

Here is a list of websites that may be of help to English teachers.

This is an ever-growing list, please feel free to add more websites!

Aggregators

• Tower of English - Provides a list of links much more comprehensive than this list, though many are broken.
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Full Lessons

• Breaking News English - A full lesson plan based on a news story. The text of the news story is written by the site and is thus targeted at learners. The topics tend to vary, and are typically chosen to appeal to younger people. Each news story has so many activities associated with it that you could never cover them all in a single class.
• Daily ESL - Entire conversation-based lessons dealing with various different topics.

Games / Activities

• Three Wise Monkeys - Activity database created by a group of JETs from Tochigi Prefecture, and are thus likely to work in your classrooms as well.
• ESL Flow : Never-ending list of activities and lessons.
• Dave’s ESL Café : Large but fairly unorganized list of ideas and activities. The list is huge, but many activities will be hard to implement in a Japanese classroom.

Flashcards and Worksheets

• ESL Flashcards : Database of free printable flashcards.
• DLTK Cards : Printable resources, including bingo cards, greetings cards, awards, etc... Look and feel can be fairly heavily customized before printing.
• Creative Chalk : Large database of shared worksheets and flashcards. Membership is free, however you can only download so much before you run out of "points". To get more Creative Chalk points, you have to upload your own materials.

==General Resources

• Conversation questions : Amazingly comprehensive, never-ending list of questions for topics to bring up with your students. Useful for those occasions either in or out of class when you just don't know what to say next.
• Food adjectives : Great for enhancing ability to be descriptive.

Listening

• Archie Comics : Podcasts for for ESL-themed webcomic.

Authentic Reading Practice

• Wikipedia (Simple English) : Special version of Wikipedia using simpler sentences. Mie Prefecture even has an article!
• BBC (Simple English) : Selected BBC news stories with simpler phrasing. Will still be fairly difficult for lower level students.

Utilities

• Presentation maker : Like PowerPoint but free and entirely online.
• Crosword puzzle maker : Automated crossword puzzle maker, saves you a lot of time.
• YouTube -> MP3 converter : Take any YouTube video and produce an mp3 of the audio.

Non-free Sites

• Genki English : The ideas are free, but the materials are not.