Where to Start

Your absolutely best place to start your search for class activities and strategies is TFF's "Oral English Teacher Resource Guide." All applicants receive this upon acceptance into the program.

Excellent ESL Web Resources

ESL Lesson Plans and Resources

A comprehensive list of resources is provided by California State University, Northridge. This is THE place to start. (We have noticed that this page has a number if dead links and suspect that it might not be supported anymore. However, what you can get to is worth the effort.)

Google Search

This link will take you to sites that Google finds if you enter
"teacher ESL resources" into the search field.

Of course, we have not begun to exhaust the list of online resources. Use a search engine to look up limericks, jokes, stories, games, etc. and hook in your imagination!

Music

Songs are a great way to get shy students to loosen up. Often the lyrics make great group conversation topics. There are many music resources on the web, The link included here is from the music section of ESL Lounge Site. It contains lyrics of many (relatively) modern songs thoughtful enough to promote conversation and of much more interest to students than "The Bear Went Over the Mountain."

Inexperienced teachers may feel a little overwhelmed by the lack of guidelines. You not only need to figure out how to "fill up the time" every week, you need to design lessons which actually teach your students something. Here are some of the questions tackled in this site:

• What am I doing here again?
• How do I improve my students' spoken English?
• How do I create a relaxed atmosphere in class?
• How much should I talk?
• What activities get my students to talk?
• How do I evaluate my students?
• OK, ummm, anything else I should keep in mind?
  

EnglishClub.com comes to you from Cambridge, England. It is written mainly in British English. But it has pages about other varieties of English such as American or Canadian. This site has a commercial orientation with lots of ads. But there is a lot here for free for noncommercial purposes.

This is a page of ideas for teaching English in Taiwan. Browse the great English teaching ideas and help yourself to the ideas that you like. While you are here you can add your own EFL ESL English teaching ideas that work so well for you and help your fellow English teachers.

This is a page of ideas for teaching English in Taiwan. This site offers a series of recent news articles and suggestions for discussions based upon those articles. The materials are designed for ESL teachers.

* There are currently 579 discussion topics to choose from.
* Use for ESL lessons, speaking practice, debate clubs, lesson add-ons, and more.
* Students can form discussion groups for independent speaking practice.
* The speaking activities are on everyday themes and more controversial issues.
* Each conversation lesson has ready-to-print Word and PDF downloads.
* There are 11,580 conversation questions here - That's a lot of discussion!

This is the homepage translated to English of the CCTV website. You can use the videos (with Chinese subtitles) to practice listening skills, then base discussions upon them.

Music (MP3, WAV, etc.) Search
Google used to have a tab, like the present one for images, for sound files. It seems to have disappeared. However, the Karabit Search Engine seems to work well. It allows you to hear, get the lyrics, and download the mp3 files. Other music specific search engines can be found HERE.