English Practice at Home and Helpful Links

Many of my students come to class once or twice a week, but they rarely practice English between sessions.

To speed up the learning process, I recommend that students study English at home on a daily basis.  This can be as simple as listening to English songs on YouTube, or better yet, watching movies or television shows in English.  Watching a movie in English can help build new vocabulary and it is very helpful in improving listening comprehension skills.

Additionally, there are a number of very good websites to help ESL students of all levels.  I recommend taking advantage of these resources in between classes as a way to keep English skills fresh in a student's mind.  Even if it is for only 30 minutes a day, this daily practice can really help a student learn English more rapidly.  

Here are some of my preferred websites for ESL learners.

http://www.languageguide.org/english/  This site is very good for learning basic vocabulary and it has a nice feature where if you place the cursor over an image or text you can hear the word pronounced aloud.

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab  Listening is often one of the most difficult skills for ESL students to learn.  Most classroom activities in Thailand focus on grammar, writing, and reading.  Often, students have much better comprehension when reading a text than they do when listening to the same This website gives students the chance to listen to native English spoken by adult and children's voices on a wide range of topics.

http://www.manythings.org/ This web site has quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other computer assisted language learning activities.  There are a number of listening activities here also and they recommend a number of links that should be helpful to English learners.

http://www.examenglish.com/index.html This web site is for people studying for an English language exam.
It contains free online practice tests for the most important international ESL exams: IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, and the Cambridge exams such as CAE, FCE, KET and PET.
You can also do practice tests for PTE Academic, PTE General and Michigan.

There are many other websites and resources out there.  If any readers have other recommended websites that I have not listed above, please share the links in the comments section below so that other students can benefit from them.