eslfast.com

Website Review: www.eslfast.com (www.eslyes.com)

In short: These identical websites appear simple at first, but there is a very large amount of material and it’s all really good stuff. It’s best for low-level reading practice.

You can read and listen to stories and conversations. You can also do several excellent activities related to the stories and conversations. There are Yes/No comprehension checks as well as cloze (fill-in-the-blank), sentence order, and dictation activities.

It would be nice if the vocabulary linked to an ESL dictionary (like this: www.ldoceonline.com). Also, the layout and organization are terrible. Still, the material is excellent and that’s what’s most important.

For students: Go to the site and click on any story. First read, then listen, then click the links at the bottom of the page to do the exercises. There are 365 stories on the home page, so it might be fun to try and do them all in one year.

For teachers: You could assign specific stories as homework, or go over the stories in class and then have the students do the follow-up exercises as homework. There are so many stories and conversations that you should be able to find something relevant to what you’re doing in class.

Another idea would be to have the students choose a random story for homework and then report on it for the next class.