Monthly Archives: February 2017

Special note: ELI student Samson Mwanze is presenting at the TESOL International Convention! You can help fund him here.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a very popular website which American university students use to improve their academic writing. In addition to hundreds of resources and references about academic and professional writing, OWL has a specific section for ESL students:

Here are just a few examples OWL’s hundreds of resources:

• ESL Students
• The Writing Process
• Academic Writing
• Grammar
• Punctuation
• Personal Correspondence
• Writing for a North American Business Audience
• Creative Writing
• Writing in Engineering
• Medical Writing

I have used OWL many times to help me improve my writing, and I’m sure it will help you, too. Check it out!

Hello, ELI Computer Lab Class students! The focus of this week’s resources is pronunciation.

The Sounds of American English is a phonetics website run by the University of Iowa. On the website, you can see pictures, videos, and animated diagrams of how to pronounce each of the sounds of American English.

Ship or Sheep is a simple website designed to help you practice minimal pairs, which are pairs of sounds that are very similar to each other. For example, ‘t’ and ‘d’ are very similar to each other. They are only different in one way: ‘t’ is voiceless and ‘d’ is voiced.

Rachel’s English is a popular YouTube channel focused on English language learning. It is especially well known for its pronunciation videos. You can see a list of video topics here. For example, there is a set of videos all about the flap ‘t’, which is the small, short ‘d’ sound Americans pronounce in the middle of words like “water” and “butter.”

I hope you enjoy these resources! There are hundreds of other websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, and so on which focus on English pronunciation, so let me know in the comments what you favorites are!

Hello! This week’s ESL resources are two good online listening practice websites for ESL students. In the ELI, we all know about TED.com, which has thousands of short lectures. TED is great, but it isn’t specifically designed for ESL students. Here are two websites that are!

ESL Lab

http://www.esl-lab.com/

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab is a free website with hundreds of short listening activities, complete with pre-listening activities and comprehension questions.

Voice of America Learning English

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/

Voice of America Learning English is a free news website funded by the US government. Its stories are designed for English language learners and include resources such as vocabulary lists. The website even includes a built-in dictionary (click on a word to see a short definition).

In addition to the news stories, VoA Learning English also has series of content focused on the English language. Check these out, for example:

• Words and Their Stories
• News Words
• Let’s Learn English
• Everyday Grammar