Learning Vocabulary online

The following web site is designed to teach ESL/EFL students useful vocabulary and grammar skills through several CALL activities like multiple-choice quizzes, fill in the blanks tests, matching exercises and crossword puzzles. The activities are sorted into six levels from easy to difficult. There is also an additional section in this website that includes bilingual vocabulary quizzes covering several languages.

I really think that this is a very useful website for learning and reinforcing vocabulary learned especially due to the variety of topics covered in this site. ESL/EFL students can learn vocabulary about several topics that are categorized under nouns, verbs, adjectives, opposites, idioms, phrasal verbs, homonyms, abbreviations, slangs and many more. I truly like the homonyms’ section as it can improve both students’ vocabulary and spelling skills.

I personally would use the exercises of this website as post-task activities for my students to help them practice and reinforce vocabulary learned.

Here is a link of my vocabulary CALL website: http://a4esl.org/

ESL/EFL CALL Website

The following web site is designed to teach English as a second/ foreign language to ESL/EFL students through a combination of CALL activities. The site is designed for different levels and contains several sections for vocabulary, speaking, grammar, listening, reading, writing and other linguistic areas like idioms, proverbs, slang expressions and anagrams.
As far as reading is concerned, this website has a very interesting section that combines the listening and reading skills by providing ESL/ EFL students with readings from different genres that they can read and listen to along flash/MP3. There is also a YouTube videos link that supplements the listening & readings section.
Teaching reading through this CALL website depends on your students' level as well as the genre of your text. One of my ways of teaching reading is to provide prereading, reading, and postreading activities like having students make predictions, listen to the MP3 before, while or after reading the text, summarize it, or relate the reading to their personal experiences.

Here is a link of my CALL website http://www.manythings.org/

I hope you find it useful for your students!

CALL Experience

My very first CALL experience was in one of the courses I took in the MA in Applied Linguistics program entitled "Curriculum Development and Materials Design".This course gave me the opprtunity to learn and use some good CALL tools like Jing, deliscious and webquest. In the following semester, I fortunately got the chance to teach as an intern in a smart classroom at Columbia College Chicago where I was able to utilize some of those CALL tools as well as being able to teach using some other really good ESL websites .

The question that I would post is: do you think that ESL students actually need CALL materials or it just makes your job as a teacher better and easier?