ABOUT THIS SITE
Teacher Steve is a site for EFL/ESL teachers and teacher educators. It offers a broad collection of resources, presented in twenty sections or categories (handouts and lessons; Songs and Chants), each one containing from five to twenty links to carefully selected websites or webpages. In addition to practical resources for everyday classroom use, you will find links to teacher forums, blogs, webinars and podcasts, all of which will contribute to your continuing professional development.
Most of the resources I have selected are straightforward, but I believe a few comments and words of explanation would be beneficial.
The general sites have several to sometimes many categories of useful links and offer a wide variety of tips, ideas, suggestions and teaching resources. It will be well worth your time and effort to explore each of these sites.
The section Journals and Magazines has two subsections, Practical Journals and Academic Journals. The practical journals are mainly classroom and teacher oriented. With two exceptions (ELT Journal and MET), they are Open Access. The academic journals are more research oriented (but also occasionally contain practical articles). They contain some open-access articles, but for the most part require a paid subscription.
You will probably recognize many of the ELT professionals. Clicking on a name will get you brief biographical information and (for most of them) links to downloadable articles.
If you are not familiar with Jazz Chants, be sure to check it out (in the section Songs and Chants). They are great for pronunciation work, as well as for practicing select grammatical structures and vocabulary items. Your students, whatever their age, will love the chants.
In Tools to Make Worksheets, you will find resources to make your own handouts and quizzes. Don’t miss ELO, Professor Vilson Leffa’s Electronic Learning Organizer.
In Proficiency Scales, Levels and Exams you will find information about CEFR, the Cambridge English Scale, Pearson Global, IELTS and ACTFL. Be sure to watch the English Profile explanatory video. Also, the examples of speaking tests in the Cambridge English Scale will be especially useful to show what you can realistically expect from your students at different levels.
In Lexical Resources, you will find an assortment of dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual); translators; synonym finders; collocations helpers; concordance programs; text analyzers and simplifiers; and vocabulary and grammar profilers.
Collocations are common word combinations, that is, two or sometimes more words that commonly and naturally occur together (either adjacent or in close proximity). A concordance program shows examples of a particular word or phrase found in a large data base (usually millions of words of text). It shows the item searched for, with each instance of it centered in a separate line of text showing a certain number of words that come before and after. The collocations and concordance sites will help you and your students to see which words can go together and “sound right.” These sites are not difficult to use, but you will need to experiment with them and read any online help provided. I particularly like Just the Word and Word Neighbors.
The text simplifier Wordify permits you to paste in a short text and then see the text rewritten in simpler English. The text analyzers show you the general level of a text as well as the specific level of each word in the text in relation to the CEFR or to well-known vocabulary level lists (first thousand words, etc). The vocabulary and grammar profilers permit you to check the specific meanings of words and structures you plan to teach, again with reference to the CEFR levels.
There are countless sites for EFL/ESL teachers, and thus there are certainly valuable sites that I have missed. Nevertheless, I believe that I have made a good selection, a selection that will provide useful resources to enhance your classroom as well as opportunities for continuing your professional development.