100 Ways to improve your English

A few weeks ago Jeffrey Hill, the person behind The English Blog, started a number of posts under the title 100 Ways to Improve Your English.

Originally, Jeffrey intended to "post each 'way' to the blog as I finish it", having published six posts so far:

no 1 way was on Twitter.
no 2 way was on Podcasts.
no 3 way was on Language Exchange sites.
no 4 way was on Listening to the radio.
no 5 way was on BBC Learning English.
no 6 way was on Vocabulary.

At this stage the series of posts stopped because Jeffrey came up with new plans, which you can read about here.

Simple English Videos revisited

We posted about SimpleEnglish Videos back in 2012 but Vicki and Jay refurbished it some weeks ago, so we thought it would be a good idea to remind everyone of the site.
 

Simple English Videos intends to help learners to speak more fluently and with confidence. To do so, Vicki and Jay show how English is used in real life with videos, ‘with jokes along the way’. They shoot the majority of the videos themselves in their home or in locations nearby with the help of friends and acquaintances.

Students will find more than one hundred videos on the site grouped under three levels: Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced. The videos are also grouped according to these categories: British and American English; Business English; Grammar; Hangouts; Short conversations; Social English; Songs and stories; Vocabulary.

In addition, every Sunday they broadcast The English Show live on their YouTube channel, which is full of language practice, game, conversation and raps. 

Every week the show revolves around a different English-learning aspect: How to improve your listening and vocabulary by watching movies; English questions; English to advance your career; National Fairy Tale Day; Improve your listening with podcasts; Celebrate St Valentine’s Day; UK and US pronunciation differences; How to sell and convince in English; and so on.

A war of words

900 teenagers from around the world participated in The New York Times' latest 15-Second Vocabulary Video Contest.

The New York Times invited teenagers to create a short video that defines or teaches any of the words in their Word of the Day collection, which has now over 1,600 words.

Drop by The New York Times to have a look at the winners listed in alphabetical order as well as a list of runners-up.

The videos were chosen on the grounds of their originality and how well each video showed an understanding of the word and its use in a specific context.

Idiomic: A site to learn idioms

A few weeks ago Jeffrey Hill informed on Idiomic on The English Blog. Idiomic is a site to learn idioms through illustrations.

Here's the way the site describes itself:

Idiomic? Never heard that word before….
Don’t look ‘idiomic’ up in the dictionary. It won’t be there. Iddy just made it up. It’s part idiom, part comic.

Idiomic hopes to explore the world of idioms with a bit of humour, a bit of colour, and a bit of useless information.

In each post, our host, Iddy, will try his best to understand each idiom, illustrated in lavish technicolor. Below his attempts we will explore the phrase with a definition, an example, and finally, an attempt to find its origin.

Iddy’s not a linguist, so he’s approaching this on a purely amateur level. He invites you to correct any errors he’s made or theories you may have heard.

He’s also happy to take suggestions of idioms to explore, so please, drop him a line. After all, it’s lonely being a big green ball.

Drama from BBC Learning English: The Race

In mid-Febraury this year, the BBC Learning English site launched The Race, a new drama suitable for intermediate students.

The Race, tells the story of Phil, a writer living in London. His life isn't very interesting but it's about change dramatically!

Students can can download the weekly instalments of the audio file and PDF of the transcript and they can also subscribe to the podcast.

H/T to The English Blog.

Kiosko

Kiosko.net is a visual daily press directory that gives access to the world's largest news sites and displays a readable image taken from today's frontpage cover of each newspaper.

The site can be useful for both English students and teachers to compare how the same news item is reported from a different perspective.

h/t to Nik Peachy.

Read Listen Learn

Read - Listen - Learn is a collection of graded reading activities ranging from elementary to advanced level.

Most of the texts have audio recordings, so learners can read and listen at the same time. Similarly, the stories have a glossary and some graphic aids to help the student understand the most complex vocabulary in the stories.

The stories can be either fictional or non-fictional and they range  between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

To select which story to read, just click on the Find articles tag at the top.

Read - Listen - Learn is free, but you have to log in with through Facebook.

Write and improve

Write & Improve is a free online service from Cambridge University Press to help English students of all levels improve their writing skills. Here's the way Cambridge University Press describes Write & Improve.

"Write & Improve is the best way to improve your written English outside the classroom. Just choose a task and write about the topic.

Submit your work and Write & Improve  will award you a Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level, so you can see your progress. It will check your spelling, vocabulary and grammar in seconds and suggest ways to improve your writing.

Write & Improve is the reliable new way to improve your writing skills. And it’s completely free for learners of English!"

BBC's English at university

English at university is a new animated series by BBC Learning English that brings intermediate students the English words and phrases they need to help them through their first year of study abroad.

Every week you can follow new student Mary, through her first year of study abroad - at The University of Studies – that's the UK's thirty-second best university - where she's been offered a place to study for a degree in Business.

In each episode English at university provides key phrases and vocabulary that may come in handy for foreign students planning to study in Britian or in an English-speaking country.

The course comes complete with a downloadable PDF with the transcript and audio file, which makes it possible for students to listen to the episodes as a podcast.

In addition, students have the opportunity to expand their learning through the external links each unit provides.

Radio Sweden -News in English

Radio Sweden broadcasts a daily news programme in English which students at an intermediate and advanced level may find of interest.

The show lasts about 26 minutes and is downloadable as a podcast. In addition, individual news items are showcased so we can choose them if we just want to listen to a three- or four-minute segment on a specific topic.

On the minus side, it must be said that the daily show doesn't come complete with transcript, but many of the individual segments have been transcribed, at least partially.

As you can imagine, a good share of the news deals with domestic issues, which can help us to get acquained with life and culture in that part of the world.

English with Jo

English with Jo is a site where English learners, especially those at intermediate and advanced levels, will have the opportunity to gain access to a large number of speaking and vocabulary resources.

By clicking on the Conversation Lessons tag students will find a trove of over 100 self-contained lessons around general interest topics which usually come up in both English exams and in the classroom (toys and games, homes, censorship, singlehood, parenting, artificial intelligence, household chores, and so on).

All the lessons keep to the same layout:
a short video to introduce the topic
some basic vocabulary to talk about the topic
a comprehensive questionnaire to talk about the topic

Other sections of the site are 'Word of the Day', 'Idiom of the Day', 'Phrasal verbs', Useful vocabulary'.

All in all Australian teacher Jo has put together an invaluable resource that might come in handy for both teachers and students.

The Current

The Current is Canada's most listened-to radio programme.  

The Current is a current affairs daily radio programme that mainly deals with news stories in Canada. However, very many of the issues the programme touches on have a universal appeal and are of interest to listeners from all over the world.

The Current can be a more than interesting listening resource for both English teachers and advanced English students, as they can find attractive and up-to-date topics to listen to. In addition, the programmes  can be downloaded either totally or on a segment-basis, and a transcript is also available. There is also an archive that stores the programmes broadcast in the previous three months.

BBC Learning English: Towards Advanced

In ealry July BBC Learning English started the latest of their online courses for English students, Towards Advanced.

As the name of the course suggests, Towards Advanced is aimed at students who want to climb up the ladder from an upper-intermediate level to C1.

As the other BBC Learning English courses (Lower-intermediate, Intermediate and Upper-intermediate), Towards Advanced consists of 30 units. As a unit goes online on a weekly basis, the course will fully be available at the beginning of 2017.

Each unit is divided into five sections: English Masterclass (grammar), News Review (where an outstanding news story is thoroughly dealt with), Lingohack (headlines of the week's main stories), Vocabulary (idiomatic expressions) and Tim's Pronunciation Workshop.

IELTS Liz

IELTS Liz is a website for IELTS test preparation. Tips, lessons, tasks and information are given for free to students by Liz, a UK-based teacher who has ample experience and who has specialised in IELTS in the last years of her professional career.

Students in the intermediate-to-advanced level preparing for any other exam like the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas exam in Spain will also greatly benefit from IELTS Liz, as they will be able to find countless reading, listening, speaking and writing activities.

Down to Business English podcasts

Down to Business English is a podcast for people who use English as a Second Language in their work environment and are trying to improve their overall language skills.

In each episode, Down to Business English hosts Dez Morgan, who lives in Tokyo, and Skip Montreux, who is based in Auckland, discuss business stories making the news around the world.

Through their discussions, Skip & Dez introduce business-related vocabulary and phrases, review grammar, and identify cultural differences in international business situations.

Although the 15-minute podcasts are mainly business-oriented, general English learners in the intermediate-to-advanced bracket will greatly benefit from Down to Business English, as most of the topics dealt with have a universal appeal (millenials, music streaming, Uber, youth unemployment, gaming, the future of restaurants, and so on).

The podcasts are free to download and a courtesy transcript is offered to those users who register, but a subscription is required to have access to all transcripts .

Listen Current

Listen Current is a US education website that selects the best clips of American public radio, mainly from the National Public Radio (NPR) for use by teachers, who can use them to both build their students' listening skills and help English-language learners and others who need a boost with language literacy.

Listen Current brings authentic voices and engaging non-fiction stories to the classroom on a range of topics ranging from immigration to science to literature.

You can sign up for free and gain access to the almost one thousand audio clips in the platform, together with their listening comprehension questions and discussion themes.

Some extra features on the platfrom include transcripts, lesson plans, key vocabulary in the stories and extra materials, although a subscription is needed to gain access to them.

All in all, Listen Current is an excellent platfrom for students in the intermediate-to-advanced level to develop their listening skills.

youglish -an online pronunciation dictionary

One of the great advantages of the internet for the language learner is the possibility of using online dictionaries to check the pronunciation of a word as well as its meaning and examples in sententences of how it is used.

The Cambridge Dictionaries Online, the Macmillan Dictionary,  the Oxford Dictionaries and many others offer this feature.

In addition, students have at their disposal some online pronunciation dictionaries like Forvo or Howjday, which come in handy when we want to find out how names are pronounced.

A few weeks ago Jeffrey Hill posted on youglish on The English Blog. youglish uses YouTube videos to illustrate how words are pronounced. The videos come complete with subtitles and  youglish  sports a repeat button so that we don't have to rewind the video to hear the word again. We can even specify whether we want the British, American or Australian English pronunciation.

English Waves, the French radio station that speaks English

A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Hill posted about EnglishWaves on his excellent The English Blog.

EnglishWaves is a "French radio station that speaks English". A wide variety of programmes (on news, culture, travel, sport, films, health, cooking, technology, economy, politics) are broadcast regularly.

EnglishWaves is a more than interesting listening site for English learners in the intermediate-to-advanced level.

The live radio and the latest weekly shows are free, but if learners want to have access to the archive and to the transcriptions, they must subscribe.

ESL Culips

Esl Cupids is a site where English learners in the intermediate-to-advanced level will find a trove of podcasts on everyday topics spoken in real current English.

There are two kinds of podcasts in ESL Cupids: Chatterbox episodes, in which we can listen to interviews with guests, and Catch Word episodes, with a focus on vocabulary.

Optionally, there are learning materials for learners to further delve into the vocabulary and specific cultural aspects of the podcasts.

Radio Praha

Radio Praha is a radio station that allows us to listen to the news from that part of the world in English.

All the audio files are downloadable in MP3 format and a lot of the news items come together with their transcript.

As you can well imagine, most of the programmes on Radio Praha have to do with Czech society and its problems. Here, the avid English learner in the intermediate-to-advanced level will find stories on the arts, books, current affairs, business, interviews with interting Czech figures, travel, and so on.

As an example, here's the link to the interview with bilingual translator Lucie Mikolajková.