Ron's ESL Blogs

In many cases, the best way to improve your English fast is to immerse yourself in the language.

Why does it work so fast?

Well, when all you have in order to communicate is your English, then you simply don’t have a choice! You learn English, or you die trying

Of course, sometimes you cannot move to an English speaking country for a few years time, but there are other means we can use to try and imitate this kind of immersion.

One of those is videos.

The best thing would probably be to find videos on a subject that really interests you. Then, while watching, you should check out the new words in a good dictionary. You can use each new word in a few sentences – it will help you understand and remember it better.

Why should you choose a video on a subject that you really like?

Because it’s more fun! And it will give you more motivation to carry on through the obstacles.

The internet offers practically millions of videos, on any subject. You can watch them at your own pace, and pause whenever you need to. (Unlike shows or movies on the TV!)

You can go to websites like YouTube, or simply search for videos on your favorite subject on Google.

You can click here for the Learn English Video Section. In contains videos especially adapted for English learners.

Ola Zur is the editor of Really Learn English Vocabulary and Easy English Grammar, an illustrated guide to English.

If you are teaching ESL/EFL beginners, you might want to take a look at the free online reading materials. They are located at:

http://www.rong-chang.com/easyread/index.html

http://www.rong-chang.com/supereasy/index.htm

Students can read and listen, look at images. It is an excellent learning resource on the Web. Students can do it as homework.

Easy Reading (http://www.rong-chang.com/easyread/), and
Super Easy Reading (http://www.rong-chang.com/supereasy/) are now available for ESL beginners.   – Ron

www.eslfast.com is another new ESL website to help people learn English. There are 365 short stories written for ESL learners. Students can read one story a day to finish reading the online book within a year. They can also listen to the stories and do the exercises such as word puzzles and sentence dictation.

The “365 ESL Short Stories” website (http://www.eslfast.com) can help ESL instructors use the Internet to present ESL materials. The intermediate-level stories are short and interesting. They are about 200-300 words long, and cover many different topics. The stories can be printed out for classroom use, listed as an online textbook in a syllabus, or given as extra homework.

Online ESL materials complement traditional textbooks. Such materials are easily accessible, easy to update, and free. Students can read a story and listen to it simultaneously. In fact, the eslfast website can be used as an entire online textbook. Students can look up definitions of any new word in each story with just one click. They can hear the pronunciation of any individual word, search for a picture of it, or even watch a video clip of it online, all with ONE CLICK! Stories online can supplement or stand alone as valuable ESL instruction material.  -Ron Lee

One big problem for ESL learners learning English is that there are too many new words. If you stop to look up every new word in the dictionary, you forget what you are reading, and eventually you lose interest in reading. Thanks to answers.com for creating such a wonderful free tool — 1-Click Answers. You can download this free software at www.answers.com.

The program is really a wonderful tool for online readers. Once you have installed the software, you can click on any word to get its definitions and pronunciation instantly. There is no need for a dictionary any more. If your English is not good enough to understand the English definitions, there is also translation of the word available. Isn’t that great?   -Ron Lee