Best Online Resources for Teaching Advanced Students

Advanced learners already have robust vocabularies and are quite confident with grammar items. In the modern era of World Wide Web, teachers get access to an absolute treasure trove of fantastic resources which work for Advanced ESL learners, e.g. The New York Times for both national and international coverage, BBC with up-to-date coverage of events both in Britain and abroad. All these resources provide advanced students with rich, authentic English materials. What else can teachers use? Hereby, you can find a list of top-notch online resources for Advanced learners.

Listening

1. ESL Cyber Listening Lab. ESL teacher Randall Davis put together a very impressive site, filled with listening quizzes. One of the things you’ll notice about the ESL Cyber Listening Lab at first glance is that the quizzes are divided into the sections of Easy, Medium, Difficult, and Very Difficult. Each quiz comes with a pre-listening activity, a multiple-choice quiz based on the listening and post-listening activities that include vocabulary exercises. These are wonderful ready-to-use listening activities for any level.

2. Talk English. This site has listening lessons for Basic, Intermediate and Advanced students. Learners have the possibility to listen to a conversation, complete a multiple choice quiz and read a script of the audio. Teachers and students can use the website online free of charge.

3. Voice of America is one of online resources which provide learners with some useful news from the USA. The site features MP3 audio and video. You may not only use the files in the classroom but also download them. Each video is less than three minutes long and comes with subtitles. Advanced English learners can read classic literature with American Stories, learn idioms and expressions with Words and Their Stories, study with Everyday Grammar, and follow innovations and trends in Education in the U.S. and around the world. Let’s Teach English and News Literacy are free online training programs for advanced learners and English teachers.

4. We can’t do without TED talks.Here are some great sites with activities to videos:  TED-Ed has a bunch of videos with the following activities: Watch, Think, Dig Dipper, and Discussion. Ted Talks have a big arsenal of videos which focus on different topics. You can choose the appropriate topic and listen to authentic speeches. As a post-listening activity teachers can ask students to write a short summary of the video, write out some useful vocabulary items or retell the video.

5. Businessenglishpod offers a wide range of podcasts with post-listening detailed questions. The latter may lead to classroom discussions.

Reading

6. Linguapress is a bank of reading articles for Advanced learners.  All the reading articles have post-reading activities (gap-fill, forming questions which trigger speaking skills).

7. ESOL Courses has multi-level reading articles with post-reading activities (multiple choice, grammar exercises, and discussion activities).

8. History’s  holiday page has a wealth of readings and videos that can be adapted into full lesson plans.

Vocabulary

9. Using English is one of those sites you can wind up in the search for activities, and their exhaustive list of idioms is also really useful. Mostly, they are organized by topics which makes it very appealing to the users.

10. English-Hilfen’s Idioms & Proverbs. You can come across the English-Hilfen site while looking on idioms and informal English items. With hundreds of idioms and proverbs presented in context, you won’t be running out any.

All the above-mentioned sites contain authentic materials which come at handy especially for Advanced learners since they are quite proficient users of the language. The awesome thing about these sites is that they offer scripts, vocabulary lists and plenty of other resources that won’t leave your students navigating alone in a sea of English exercises.