November 16, 2004

I made a list of online materials for ESL learners, ones that I could recommend to students, and ones that I would like to include in my own teaching, homework, and web based trainging systems.

The factors that governed my choice are
1) That they should encourage fluency at least as much as accuracy, and stand on the fluency side of the fence. If accuracy is the main issue then any part of the web, any article in any magazine, blog or news station can be used for detailed reading. My own sentiments lean towards: extensive, rather than detailed, reading; aquisition rather than learning; and comprehensible input.
2) To that end input should either be simplified, interms of its grammar and lexicon, or contain multimedia cues to aid comprehension.
3) My current institutions focus upon the TOEIC encourages the use of input materials that have an oral component -- but not exclusively.
4) As far as possible the materials should be interesting, of course.

Materials and suggested ways of using them follow.

1) Ask students to find their favourite track on
http://launch.yahoo.com/
that is not yet realeased in Japan, explain why you like it and what the song is about. Include a link to the page where we can hear the song.

2) Watching and reporting, perhaps giving a synopsys of flash movies. Flash movies are fast to download, fun, and growing in popularity.
Eg.
http://www.theflasharchive.com/f/f-276.htm
From
http://www.theflasharchive.com/index.php
Other possibilities are
http://www.holylemon.com/
And after watching them, students might be encouraged to make their own at
http://www.dfilm.com/index_moviemaker.html

3) Watching and reporting on mpg movies. They can be very slow to download
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/
or television commercials (this next link is hightly recommended)
http://www.ad-awards.com/home.php
http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Television/Commercials/
http://www.x-entertainment.com/
 
4) Watching and reporting on movie trailers that have yet to be released in Japan, such as
http://tinyurl.com/537nw
http://tinyurl.com/3qcgd
at
http://www.movie-page.com/trailers.htm
http://www.apple.com/trailers/
http://www.joblo.com/movietrailers.php
 
5) There has got to be a way of using Voice Of America. I think that it is okay to download and use VOA programs.
http://www1.voanews.com/
E.g. this easy to listen to news program can be streamed from here
http://www.voanews.com/real/voa/english/spec/specengla.ram
and downloaded here
ftp://8475.ftp.storage.akadns.net/real/voa/english/spec/special_english.rm
If everyong cooperated on this then we could make a news listening comprehension once a week on up to date news. That would be a big deal. If anyone is prepared to get into doing this then please contact me.

Similarly there is the BBC but I do not think that they encourage downloads
http://www.bbc.co.uk/

6) Other radio programs
But I do not know if they are downloadable.
http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Radio/Programs/
http://www.cbc.ca/programguide/radio/

Leaving listening aside and moving onto REAL communication, I recommend

7) Participation in chat
http://chat.yahoo.com

8) Communicating with penpals (I have used this a lot to good effect, I think) Instructions and warnings Japanese
http://www.nihonbunka.com/eigodaigaku/penpals.htm
Instructions of how to use the penpal finding site in Japanese
http://web.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~tim/penpal/penpal.html?name
Recommended Penpal finding site in English
http://www.japan-guide.com/penfriend/index_e.php

Extensive Reading -- there are few graded readers on the net but
http://eastoftheweb.com 
http://promo.net/pg/
seem like good places to start