ESL: English as a Second Language

In this activity, students listen to and read along with a short story about a bus driver written in the simple present tense and complete a variety of practice activities including a crossword puzzle, cloze task, sentence scramble, and dictation.

Use this Web site to teach students expressions that will help them learn to speak better and gain fluency in English. There are a number of different types of lessons, which follow a "Click, Listen, and Repeat" functionality. In most of the lessons, users read the sentence, select the sentence to listen to the sentence, and then practice speaking by repeating after the audio file provided by a native English speaker. This method includes reading, speaking, and listening all at the same time. The Interview section would be valuable for students to practice questions and answers for many types of interviews, from immigration and citizenship-related to employment interviews, so this particular activity focuses there, but feel free to use the many others at this site in a similar fashion.

Make bingo cards quickly and easily with the words of your choice using this bingo card generator. Bingo cards can be used to reinforce definitions, new vocabulary, or even grammar.

The Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment is a self-guided, online set of assessments that show an individual’s ability to perform basic computer skills in eight skill area areas:

• Basic Computer Use
• Internet
• Windows OS/Mac OS
• E-mail
• Word Processing (using Microsoft Word)
• Social Media
• Excel
• PowerPoint

Use these assessments for post-testing your students on these various skills.

This activity is an ice breaker to use on the first day of class to help students learn about one another and to help them begin to form a community of learners. Studies have shown that where community exists, persistence is less of a problem. This Web site lists 10 ice breakers for use in adult classes with complete step-by-step instructions. This activity highlights the People Bingo activity.