Index of Free ESL Lessons

This blog post features an index of free lessons and advice posts about learning English as a second language. Look through them and consider improving your English language skills so much more by signing up for Kingston University USA courses for any skill set.

The Basics of English Words


Practice: The Basics of English Words


Punctuation Marks


Educational Vocabulary


Singular and Plural


Practice: Singular and Plural Nouns


Pictures: Singular and Plural Nouns


Possessive Nouns


Introduction to Symbols


Possessive Pronouns


Symbols w/ Pictures


Possessive Adjectives


Pictures: Signs


Contractions


More Contractions

Even More Contractions

Asterisk


Formal English and Informal English


ESL Lesson: Tenses (Part 1)


ESL Lesson: Tenses (Part 2)


Practice with Pictures: Tenses


Writing Letters


Casual Letter Writing


Writing Business Letters


Internet Part I


Internet Part II

Do you have any questions or comments about any ESL subject? Leave them in the comment section and we will answer them. Stay tuned for more free advice on this and other subjects as well as promotions and news! If you want individual tutoring and help in learning English, contact Kingston University USA today!!

If you want individual tutoring and help in learning English, contact Kingston University USA today!!

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Language Learning Expands Platform to Support ESL Education in Libraries and Workplaces

This article from PR News Wire discusses the use of games in education and learning, specifically language learning and ESL. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The Learning Games Network, a non-profit spin-off of the MIT Education Arcade that bridges the gap between research and practice in game-based education, today announced a $1.99 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand Xenos, its flagship integrated social learning environment gaming platform, for Hispanic adults learning English (ESL) in libraries and workplaces. The goal of the Play Games-Learn English Project is to provide self-directed ESL instructional resources to adults in informal learning and vocational training settings. Pilot sites include the Boston and San Francisco Public Libraries and BJ's Wholesale Clubs.

In the schools: Clarkstown South students raise Make a Wish funds; more

This article is from lohud.com

Guests braved the dreary weather to support a fundraising dinner Feb. 29 at the Jesse J. Kaplan School.

The dinner coordinated by the Rockland County Welcome Committee and the Nanuet Lions Club raised more than $3,000 to support scholarships for Rockland BOCES adult English as a Second Language (ESL) students who are continuing their education through a CareerTrack program.

The buffet-style meal featured five family recipes from BOCES ESL students: Carmelle Mehu Milien and Dunie Ferdinand from Haiti, Regina Rivas from the Dominican Republic, Rolando Martinez from El Salvador and Matanat Imanova from Azerbaijan. The recipes were chosen from the “Bring Your Ancestor’s Best Family Recipe” contest open to upper level ESL students.

National Geographic Learning Secures Significant Customer Adoptions in Florida and Texas

This article is from The Sacramento Bee

 National Geographic Learning, part of Cengage Learning and a provider of quality educational and ELT materials for the K‐12, academic and adult education markets, today announced significant adoptions of their K-5 Science and K-8 English as a Second Language (ESL) products in Floridaand Texas, respectively.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20070724/NYTU125 )

National Geographic Learning (NGL) Science has been adopted by 21 school districts in the state of Florida, including Hillsborough County, the third-largest district in the state. This innovative and forward-thinking science product is a newcomer to the K-5 science sector and has achieved 28 percent market share in the state – reaching more than 320,000 elementary students. These students will have the opportunity to experience a research-based program that brings science learning to life.  Covering all aspects of science – science inquiry, science content and scientific literacy – NGL Science works with educators to immerse students in the nature of science, unlock big ideas, build scientific and content literacy, and get students to think objectively as scientists. The product was created to be customizable, so as to target the specific individual science standards in any given state.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/08/4322184/national-geographic-learning-secures.html#storylink=cpy

Texas District Selects Android Tablet for ESL Students

This article is from The Journal

A Texas school district is deploying 100 education-oriented tablets across several middle schools specifically to assist with ESL programs.

Garland Independent School District will distribute Brainchild’s Kineo tablets for use with the company's Achiever! software to help English language learners prepare for STAAR testing, the Texas state assessments.

The ESL students will use the tablets for individualized instruction. When Achiever! is used online, students can view lessons in both English and Spanish. The company's remedial software, Mechanics, will also be used with some students to help build fundamental skills.

MSD Creates Parent Outreach For ESL Parents

This article is from Milford Live

Milford School District is moving forward with its initiative to reach minority communities with the institution of a Parent Resource Center. The program focuses on reaching out to parents that are historically not engaged with the public schools in the Milford area. With a growing ESL (English as a Second Language) population in the Milford School District it has become critical for school officials to use a proactive approach to incorporating these families into the district.

On Wednesday, February 29 Director of Student Support Sylvia Henderson visited First State Manufacturing with several principals and teachers from the Milford schools. The Parent Resource Center creates an outreach program for parents at their place of employment during their lunch hour. First State Manufacturing has opened its doors to school officials so that the school can speak to these parents directly. This is a unique opportunity for both the school and the parents to engage with each other about the specifics of their child’s education.

Safari Books Online Expands Online Learning Library to Include Thousands of German Language Books

This article is from Enhanced Online News

Safari® Books Online (www.safaribooksonline.com), the on-demand digital learning library for technology, digital media and business professionals, today announced that it has added hundreds of German language books to its existing library of more than 20,000 books and training videos in English for enterprises, workgroups and individuals.

Individual subscribers can access the entire library with no limits or can choose the 10-slot option which allows them to put up to 10 books or videos on their bookshelf per month. Workgroup and corporate buyers also have a variety of access options, the most popular of which is the all-access model. The library’s search tool has been augmented to search in both English and German to accommodate all subscribers. And users can read or watch videos from Safari Books Online on their computer as well as on their iPad, Android smartphone, or any other web enabled mobile device or tablet.Titles to be added are from such respected publishers as O’Reilly Verlag, Addison-Wesley Verlag, Markt+Technik Verlag, dpunkt.verlag, Wiley-VCH Verlag (für Dummies) and Microsoft Press Deutschland.

ESL Schools Grow in 2012

This article is from PR Urgent
ESL Schools are opening, or have recently opened, offices in six new places. They are Amsterdam, London, Winturther, Valencia, Anvers and Noumea (in Holland, the UK, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and New Caldeonia respectively). The Amsterdam and London offices are the first in their countries. Opening new offices helps ESL Schools get close to the people who they hope to provide language travel for. ESL Schools won the Best Language Travel Agency in Europe award in 2011, because of their demonstrable commitment to their students' needs. 

ESL Schools are, as part of this commitment, taking a leading role in sustainable development in the language travel industry. They have developed a CSR (corporate social responsibility) tool for the language schools with whom they work. The tool helps the schools work out how good their own CSR performance is in the areas of management & operations, community and education. The tool can be used by students to help them decide which school they want to learn at. ESL Schools also look at their own CSR practice. They have a full-time CSR manager, helping them to do things like encouraging their staff to use green travel modes. 

State of Education: An innovative ESL program

This article is from YNN News

The number of ESL students in New York State has grown over 19 percent in the last 15 years. Giffen Elementary School in Albany offers this class to several students of their own

"A lot of them are refugees from other countries that do not speak English, nobody at home speaks English, so this is very valuable information to them," said Betsey Domenico, an ESL teacher.

A lot of them come from the country of Burma.

"We have had a large influx of ESL students in the Albany City School District at our school in Giffen Elementary we have sixty students," said Domenico.

So what methods are being used to help students understand the sometimes tricky English language? Well, how about, riding a public transit bus?

ESL Lesson: Contractions

Contractions

This blog entry is all about contractions! 
What are contractions? 
Contractions are a part of informal English frequently used in conversation and in casual or creative writing such as an email to a friend, an anecdote (or a true story someone tells) or a fictional story. 

Don't is a contraction of the words do not.

Contractions are the shorthand way of writing or saying two words as just one word. Very often contractions use the apostrophe (‘) and the removal of letters to make a new word. Contractions should not be used in formal writing such as business letters. In business letters, you should write out words instead of using shorthand like contractions. Here are some examples of contractions.

Can't

Can’t is a contraction of the words can not or the word cannot. The second “o” is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I can not meet you this Friday as I am very busy.
I can’t meet you this Friday as I am very busy.


Don’t

Don’t is a contraction of the words do not. The second “o” is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I do not have any appointments next Monday.
I don’t have any appointments next Monday.


Doesn't

Doesn’t is a contraction of the words does not. The “o” in not is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
She does not like to drink coffee.
She doesn't like to drink coffee.


Didn't 

Didn’t is a contraction of the words did not. The “o” in not is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I did not talk to Mr. Jones last week.
I didn't talk to Mr. Jones last week.


Couldn't 

Couldn’t is a contraction of the words could not. The “o” in not is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I could not reach Mr. Jones last week through phone calls or email.
I couldn’t reach Mr. Jones last week through phone calls or email.


Wouldn't 

Wouldn’t is a contraction of the words would not. The “o” in not is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I would not spend too much money on office supplies. I wish to stay within my budget.
I wouldn't spend too much money on office supplies. I wish to stay within my budget.


Haven’t

Haven’t is a contraction of the words have not. The second “o” is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I have not reviewed your paperwork yet.
I haven’t reviewed your paperwork yet.


Won’t

Won’t is a contraction of the words will not. The second “o” is replaced by an apostrophe (‘), and the space in between the two words is eliminated. Consider the following two sentences.
I will not be able to attend the meeting this Thursday.
I won’t be able to attend the meeting this Thursday.


I hope these explanations help you understand the concept of contractions better. Remember that contractions are informal and that these are general contractions. We’ll post more on other contractions in the future. Do you have any other questions or comments about this or any other ESL subject? Leave them in the comment section and we will answer them. Stay tuned for more free advice on this and other subjects as well as promotions and news! If you want individual tutoring and help in learning English, contact Kingston University USA today!!

Kingston University USA
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ESL needs grow in Waynesboro

This article is from newsleader.com 

It's been a stretch lending a hand to Waynesboro students who need help learning English.

The city has the largest number of students who are still learning English in the area, but only one more English as a second language specialist than does Staunton, which has one-fifth as many students in need of help.

Serving students who are still learning English has special challenges. Needs vary widely from student to student, and the support each receives varies with need, area school officials say.

In Waynesboro, the city schools seek to meet the needs of their 171 English language learners — ELL in educational jargon — with three English-as-a-second-language teachers.

That's barely enough teachers to meet the state standard of one ESL teacher for every 58 students needing to learn English. Nearly 5 percent of Waynesboro students are learning English.

Keeping up has been a challenge. While the number of ELL students in Waynesboro is down from last year, it is still up sharply from the 2009-10 school year, when Waynesboro officials scrambled to cope with an unexpected 100-plus student jump in enrollment, many of whom did not speak English.

Maggie VanHuss, director of student services, said the number also fluctuates throughout the school year as families move in and out of the city.

"Part of it is just due to student mobility," she said.

Augusta County has a different challenge. With seven teachers serving 153 students, or 1.5 percent of its student population, Augusta's student-to-teacher ratio meets the state standard easily. But some are on the road a lot. Some county schools have as many as 30 English language learners while others have only one or two.

Staunton, which has the smallest percentage of English language learners at 1.2 percent of its total enrollment, has seen little variation in the numbers served from year to year, but frequent changes during the course of a school year.

"There appears to be a higher degree of transiency," said Stephanie Haskins, director of assessment and school improvement. She added there is no one reason for the fluctuation.

Linguamatics, Brandwatch and University of Sussex Announce Project to Enhance Language Processing of Big Data

This article  is from Market Watch The Wall Street Journal 

Linguamatics, Brandwatch and the University of Sussex are pleased to announce a joint project funded by the UK's Technology Strategy Board to address challenges faced by automated language processing software in harnessing diverse data sources. The project forms part of a broader Technology Strategy Board initiative focusing on enabling technologies to harness "big data" for economic growth.

The development will improve automatic extraction of information from scientific papers, news or social media for applications in research and development, marketing, and competitive intelligence. Dr David Milward, Linguamatics CTO, points out: "Good quality vocabularies are a key part of 'intelligent' text mining. This project will allow us to develop vocabularies much faster, and adapt them efficiently for new applications."

The current generation of language processing has had considerable success in extracting useful information from unstructured text, whether this is research literature or social media. However, adapting to a new domain is often a laborious process, with respect both to the type of data (e.g. newswire vs. patent literature) and to the terminology used in a given domain (e.g. in medical practice vs. pharmaceutical research). Humans can perform these tasks on small data sets, but face a huge challenge in the face of massively increasing amounts of electronic text. The EVOKES project, which stands for "Exploitation of Diverse Data via Automatic Adaptation of Knowledge Extraction Software" will exploit distributional similarity techniques developed by the University of Sussex. The project will run for 18 months.

Editors' notes:

About Linguamatics

Linguamatics is the leader in deploying natural language processing (NLP) based text mining for complex, high-value problem solving. Used by nine of the world's Top-10 pharmaceutical companies, and other prestigious commercial, academic and government organizations, Linguamatics operates globally, with offices in the UK and USA. 

About Brandwatch

Social networks and the rest of the Web have become massive indicators of consumer influence, market insight and brand reputation. Launched in 2007, Brandwatch provides one of the world's leading tools for monitoring, capturing and analyzing social media. 

About University of Sussex

The University was first in the new wave of UK universities founded in the 1960s and is now a leading teaching and research institution. Sussex research has been formally recognized as world leading, confirming the University among the leading research universities in the UK. 

About the Technology Strategy Board

The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led government body which works to create economic growth by ensuring that the UK is a global leader in innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy.

ESL Practice: The Basics of English Words

Here are some pictures that can help demonstrate some of the fundamentals of English. You will see the pictures, followed by a sentence that describe them, and then we will explain to you what category each word fits in English.

"She is using the computer at her desk."

She is a pronoun  in this sentence.

Using is a verb in this sentence.

Computer is a noun  in this sentence.

At is a preposition  in this sentence.

Desk is a noun  in this sentence.

"Ling is drinking coffee while listening to her co-worker."

Ling is a proper noun in this sentence.

Is is a verb in this sentence.

Drinking is a verb in this sentence.

Coffee is a noun in this sentence.

While is a conjunction in this sentence.

Listening is a verb in this sentence.

To is a preposition in this sentence.

Co-worker is a noun in this sentence.

"The workers discuss business ethics in the office."

Workers is a noun in this sentence.

Discuss is a verb in this sentence.

Business ethics is a noun  in this sentence.

In is a preposition in this sentence.

Office is a noun in this sentence.

"Ling answers the telephone call and she listens to her boss' instructions."

Ling is a proper noun in this sentence.

Answers is a verb in this sentence.

Telephone call is a noun in this sentence.

And is a conjuction in this sentence.

She is a pronoun in this sentence.

Listens is a verb in this sentence.

To is a preposition in this sentence.

Instructions is a noun in this sentence.

"Michelle is typing an email to send on her computer."

Michelle is a proper noun in this sentence.

Is is a verb in this sentence.

Typing is a verb in this sentence.

Email is a noun in this sentence.

To is a preposition in this sentence.

Send is a verb in this sentence.

On is a preposition in this sentence.

Computer is a noun in this sentence.

I hope these examples show ESL learners how English vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure works in practice. Can you form different sentences that describe the actions and images in these pictures? Do you have any questions? What are some things you wish to learn about the English language and how to write, speak and understand it? Stay tuned for more blog entries on advice and opportunities to learn through Kingston University USA.

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