Exploring ESL Activities On The Internet
byThomas Goldstein, South Seattle Community College
With the advent of World Wide Web, the Internet has become as easy to use as the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. This ease of use has drawn the attention of language-teaching professionals who are creating learning activities for ESL students. Various organizations associated with ESL programs in the United States, Europe and Asia offer World Wide Web sites with materials specifically created to help the ESL student learn certain aspects of English. Using a Web graphical browser such as Netscape (offered in many campus computer labs), student scan make use of the many activities created to help them learn and use the English language.
The Web is the easiest Internet feature to use and therefore, the best starting point for introducing the Internet to ESL students. If you can use a mouse and a Windows or Macintosh computer you can easily surf the Web. This new medium can offer teachers a powerful tool to motivate students to use English for real-life activities in class. The following is a small sample of useful ESL activities found on the WWW.
Each month Fluency Through Fables offers a new fable as a reading exercise. Using the fable as the text material, students have an option to choose from a variety of exercises to improve their English language skills. Many of the exercises offered at this site are "old favorites" end the students will be very familiar with them. True-and-false comprehension exercises are offered to test their understanding of the story. The vocabulary matching exercise helps students learn the vocabulary introduced in the story. A cloze activity called vocabulary completion is offered to reinforce vocabulary learning. A discussion exercise is offered as a free-writing practice. When students do the exercises they get immediate feedback. If any answers are incorrect, the students may return and try again.
This electronic magazine for ESL students is dedicated to publishing the English writings of non-native speakers of English. One purpose of the exchange electronic magazine is to provide ESL/EFL learners with meaningful writing activities. Exchange offers students several different themes for expressing themselves. Students can write news articles or world cultural articles, and even participate in collaborative writing by creating chain stories. The magazine can also provide students with a much wider audience for their writings beyond the classroom and the teacher.
At this website a new idiom is featured each week. Each featured idiom includes an explanation of meaning and a short dialog to demonstrate how it is used. If audio is available, students may listen to the idiom and to the dialog for listening and pronunciation practice. The Weekly Idiom offers an index of over forty idioms which have been featured in the past weeks complete with explanations and dialogs.
This website offers several dialogs complete with scripts and audio files. By clicking on the lines of the dialog one may hear a native-speaker model the conversation. Students may choose to listen to the whole conversation or they may choose specific phrases from the dialog by clicking on a particular sentence. By clicking on a phrase, it may be quickly repeated as often as desired to facilitate pronunciation or listening practice. The dialog topics include Making Friends, Apartment Hunting, At the Library and others.
For beginning students the ESL Graffiti Wall allows students of any English ability to post short comments. The comments may be on any subject and perusing the writings of other students may serve to inspire students to participate in this international writing board.
This website offers grammar search exercises with which students can broaden their linguistic experience with selected grammar structures. The activity is set up as a game and two approaches are suggested. The first game is hunting common grammatical structures on the Web, and the second game is hunting exotic grammatical structures on the Web. In both activities students are encouraged to use Web search engines and Web browsers to hunt down specific examples of grammatical strings, e.g., the subjunctive: If I were you.
There are many other excellent Internet ESL activities which space does not allow me to list here. ESL Internet activities, when used as a supplementary classroom activity, can be a useful, interesting and motivating language learning experiences.
