Feb 18 2009
The Best Sites For Free ESL/EFL Hand-Outs & Worksheets
There are tons of places on the Internet where you can find ESL/EFL hand-outs and worksheets of varied quality and varied cost. You can find a very long list of them on my website under ESL Hand-Outs And Lesson Plans.
I thought a “The Best…” list highlighting the sites that I thought were best might be useful to readers. This is sort of a companion list to The Best Resource Sites For ESL/EFL Teachers.
In order to make it on this list, the site needed to have a large quantity of high-quality resources available — free of charge — for printing-out. In addition, I’ve only listed sites that do not require registration, either. And, I’ve only listed sites whose materials I’ve actually used in my own classroom.
Many ESL/EFL textbooks have most of the same information that these hand-outs and worksheets offer. However, even — as most of us who teach ESL/EFL do — if we use a textbook, these kinds of worksheets are valuable for a few reasons:
* I’ve found that many teacher-created worksheets are just plain better at helping students learn than the textbooks I have seen, so they are excellent supplements.
* Since students can’t write in most textbooks, unless it’s a “consumable,” worksheets are good materials for students to annotate.
* These kinds of worksheets are great for use in reinforcing games. For example, I’ll have different “stations” where small groups of rotating students — under stringent time limits — have to complete different hand-outs. We then correct them as a class and tabulate the results to determine a group “winner.”
Of course, if you’re teaching in an environment that cannot afford a newer textbook — or any textbook at all – then these kinds of hand-outs are indispensable.
As I’ve mentioned, there are ton of these kinds of sites out there, and I’m sure I don’t know them all. If you know of sites that you think should belong on this list, please feel free to write about them in the comments section.
Since all the sites listed here meet the criteria I mentioned earlier, I’m not going to describe each one in detail. Instead, I’ll just provide the name and the link.
Here are my picks for The Best Sites For FRee ESL/EFL Hand-Outs & Worksheets (not in any order of preference):
My English Printable Worksheets
ESL Kingdom (unlike the others on this list, you have to register on this site. However, it’s free and just takes seconds to do so)
As always, feedback is welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.
One response so far
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Hello Larry,
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/index.html
James
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