Welcome to the English as a Second Language site, which is a starting point for ESL learners who want to learn English through the Web. Many people have created ESL learning materials for the Web. This site links you to those good and free ESL places. The variety of materials will allow you to choose something appropriate for yourself.
If you were to follow the links in the left frame in order, as I suppose you might do, then you would start with the basic fundamentals of learning English; reading, writing, listening and grammar.
The reading section starts off with a vocabulary link. It states: VoyCabulary makes the words on any webpage into links so you can look them up in a dictionary or other word-reference-site of your choice, by simply clicking on the words. Anytime you find yourself reading a webpage with words you wish to look-up, try running the page through VoyCabulary and just click on the words! For instance, if you are reading a page with complicated words, like when reading Medical pages, or perhaps reading a page in Spanish and frequently need to look-up the English equivalents, see if VoyCabulary can help you out! Sound complicated? It's actually quite simple, just put in a URL to your favorite website (try The Poisons & Antidotes Page), or type in a sentence. Once you're at the page, click on any word to look it up - It's that easy!
The writing section is probably the most useful. Many sites do not provide options for listening, but when they do any listening is helpful to the viewer. The writing sections are also fairly rare, but rong-chang provides the viewer with several differnt options for practicing their writing online:
One link claims to offer a number of handouts for students and teachers. You are free to link to these handouts, print them out, and distribute them to your classes as long as copyright information remains intact and as long as you are not distributing them for profit. They have a fair use policy for more information. If you would like information about reprinting handouts you can visit their contact page or you can also pick up paper copies of these handouts in the Writing Lab. If you are a teacher, they also have an entire section on using their Writing Lab. Handouts are grouped into categories, and each category has a separate index. Click on any category to go to that index. They also have a complete scroll-down list of handouts.
Lastly, the grammar page provides links whose general information is more dictionary style learning than anything. The sites do not have many games, which I feel are important in learning language, but they are, however, extremely practical.
