Where to Start

The absolutely best place to start your search for class activities and strategies is "Join the Conversation," TFF's extensive teacher resource guide.  All applicants receive this guide and the accompanying flash drive upon acceptance into the program.

Excellent ESL Web Resources

(All links will pop up in a new window)

Oral English activities made in China (NEW)

The aim of this site is to offer teachers a varied range of classroom activities for practising oral English. Most are commmunicative activities designed to give students conversation practice, although a few have other aims. The activities are drawn from this site's author's experience teaching oral English in a Chinese university.

ESL Lesson Plans and Resources

A comprehensive list of resources is provided by California State University, Northridge.  (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."

EnglishClub

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.

Breaking News English

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.

ESL Discussions

* 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!

Onestopenglish

Onestopenglish is a teacher’s resource site published by Macmillan English Campus, part of the Macmillan Education Group, one of the world’s leading publishers of English language teaching materials.

Newsclips in English from Chinese TV - CCTV

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.