Free lesson plans and resources for teaching English online | Virtual School of English (2024)

One Stop English

An excellent site with easy navigation to quickly find suitable ready-made lesson plans and resources. There are many free resources and a paid option to access further resources including news lessons in collaboration with the Guardian.

Breaking News English

Interesting news articles, adapted for different learner levels and many different activities linked to the news content.

Tim’s free English lesson plans

This is a great hub site with lots of resources and links to further resources.

ESOL Courses

Divided into levels, this site offers so many lessons and even entire beginner and elementary courses. Grammar, skills, songs, games, graded readers, English for work, IELTS practice, this site has a lot to offer.

New Internationalist Easier English Wiki

Quite similar to Breaking News English with the news articles from the New Internationalist adapted for learners and a activities to go alongside these.

IELTS Podcast

Lots of IELTS materials, practice questions, tips etc.

IELTS.org

Lots of sample test questions.

Flo-Joe

Practice tests for all Cambridge Exams.

British Council – Learn English

Materials at different levels to practise all the skills.

English Listening Library Online

Loads of listening materials with audio lessons and video lessons using different accents.

Spotlight English

This has 15 minute radio topics designed for English learners to allow your students to listen to native English speakers. This may be most useful as setting for homework!

Lyrics Training

This is a really nice tool for learning English through songs. There are various levels with different numbers of words missing or you can create an account and select your own missing words. This is preferable when you are practising a particular topic or grammar point.

National Geographic – Life

This site has really interesting reading materials at different levels and a whole teacher’s pack to go along with it containing the text, comprehension activities, related vocab and grammar exercises, audio file and the answer keys!

Websiteplanet–freeprintablebooks

We were recently recommended this site by one of our readers. It has a selection of free books for young kids, you could share your screen and read them with the kids or send them a copy to print out and have a go at some of the exercises.

ESOL Excellence Gateway

This site is specifically for ESOL students in the UK but many materials will be adapatable. It includeslesson plans, including downloadable notes and worksheets, and looks at topics such as English for Work and Teaching UK life.

ESOL Courses

This includes sections on Life in the UK and Life in the US.

Oxford Teachers’ Club

Oxford University Press offers extra resources and activities to complement their teaching materials. This requires registration but has a lot of extra material to sieve through which is particularly good if you’ve tired of repeating the same activities over and over.

Dave’s ESL Cafe

Lots of resources and ideas to bring to the classroom, unfortunately they are not listed by level which would help with the navigation of this site. There is also a forum which is very active if you need any specific help.

English Club

This is designed for English learners rather than teachers but has so much useful content. It is definitely worth a look if you are looking for some extra practice of a particular skill, grammar point or topic.

BBC Learning English

Mainly aimed at English learners again but loads of great resources which you could use to supplement your lessons.

Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom

Loads of different topics listed alphabetically with loads of different questions. These are not divided into student levels so you will need to pick and choose appropriate questions.

ESL discussions

The discussion section from the Breaking News English site. Loads of different topics listed alphabetically with questions divided up for “Student A” and “Student B”. These are not divided into student levels so you will need to pick and choose appropriate questions.

British Council’s Teaching English: Our favourite games

Quick ideas for games as suggested by many different ELT teachers.

Dave’s ESL Cafe: Games

Loads of great, simple ideas for games in the ELT classroom.

Wordsmith Anagram Maker

This is a very simple tool to make anagrams. Type in the word and it will create many different options of anagrams. A nice way to vary vocabulary learning.

Puzzle Maker

Easily create a variety of different puzzles including wordsearches, crosswords and more for some interactive ways to learn new vocabulary.

Games to Learn English

Loads of interactive activities to practise spelling, grammar, vocab and sentence structure.

Edwordle

A simple way to make word clouds and edit them easily.

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