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The World Wide Web seems to be stuffed with useful pages for students of English, but how can one separate the wheat from the chaff?




Liebe Schüler, sehr geehrte Kollegen, zur Zeit baue ich neue Seiten für das Fach Englisch auf. Zu Testzwecken habe ich sie schon mal online gestellt. Unter http://english.erzaehlsdenpflanzen.de/English/welcome.html können Sie einen Blick darauf werfen. Verbesserungsvorschläge sind durchaus erwünscht!

very good pages:

A page for FOS/BOS students which has many how-tos and example documents, words in context and much more: www.fosbosenglisch.de

A well-structured page for many learning purposes is:
http://www.eslgold.com

A massive link-page, lots of categories, well-structured:
http://www.englishclub.com/webguide/

One of my favourite link-pages. On this page you will easily find appropriate material and interactive pages for almost any level of language proficiency. http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html

Another good page linking many useful sites is:
http://www.li-hamburg.de/fix/files/doc/links-neuemediensek1.5.htm#grammar

A very large and very useful link-page is:
http://eslus.com/esl/resource.htm#general

The site of Abu Dhabi Men's College offers a large collection of good material for your learning purposes. Especially the examples marked as "easy" will help you a lot. Surfing this page a bit might be a very good idea! Mind you: none of their exercises were actually designed in order to prepare for your exams, some might still be very useful to you!

http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/english/reading/index.htm

descriptive writing: statistics

Two basic how-tos for your graph description:

http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/howto/graph.html

http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/jeunesse/index_analyse_graph_an.htm

The most comprehensive page for studying statistics online I know is Abu Dhabi Men's College

creative writing: composition

although I recommend sticking to two main paragraphs (two theses) this would be a perfect outline model for a composition consisting of three main paragraphs (three theses).

You will also like the online thesis builder!

vocab:

Study and revise playing vocab games:
http://www.vocabulary.co.il/

Sometimes you will also ask yourself, whether it is relevant to memorize a word or not. This is where maths comes in. The more frequent a word is, the more likely it is to occur in your exams. The more words you know, the better you will understand any text and conversation. Here you can check word frequency: wordcount.org

vocab trainers for your PC

There are quite a few good vocab trainers for your computer around.

Teachmaster is a very useful piece of freeware (Windows). One can even add sound files! http://www.teachmaster.de/index_de.html

A quite simple, but also very useful tool is the freeware "Karteikarten-Trainer" (Windows). You do not need to type in any answers there, instead you just check yourself.
You can download it for free from http://www.martin-buchholz-online.de/wortpaartrainer.html
On the site you will also find some files other FOS/BOS English students have created.

If you are lucky enough to own a Mac, go for ProVoc, it is free! You can even study & revise vocab using your ipod! http://www.arizona-software.ch/provoc/

pronunciation

A good pronunciation is essential for any sort of oral communication. These websites can help you improve your pronunciation of English.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/

http://www.cambridgeenglishonline.com/Phonetics_Focus/

English listening:

These days listening to idiomatic English has become rather easy. Practise your listening skills by listening to material YOU are interested in; you can either watch DVDs, listen to (web)radio, download podcasts or practice online doing exercises similar to those you do at school. Listening to different sources of English can be fun and it is probably the most natural way to improve your English. Try to make English a part of your everyday life! Here is a short selection of useful sites:

A fantastic site for your practice purposes:

http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/english/listen/index.htm#practice

There is a lot of very good material around on:
www.esl-lab.com (comprehension exercises in American English)

Also good, but a bit difficult:
http://www.literacynet.org/cnnsf/week.html
There is material provided by CNN, there are multiple listening, reading and other tasks in American English covering many of the topics dealt with at school.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
For those of you who prefer British English.

The New York Post has an audio short story for you each week: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/06/11/070611on_audio_danticat

There are even free audio books on the web (all legal). On this site volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. http://librivox.org/

podcasts:

What are podcasts? A short video explains.

Here you will find information on how to retrieve podcasts.
http://www.podcast.de/

Reality Check is a podcast for German listeners of English. It is Radio FM4s news programme with interviews and analysis of stories from around the world.
http://static.orf.at/fm4/podcast/fm4_reality_check.

Very good material from the BBC (British English). It is huge!:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/downloadtrial/

Very good material from NPR (American English) covering a very wide range of topics:
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php

English newspapers online & for free

There are lots of good newspaper articles available.
If you are looking for information about a particular topic just use
www.paperball.de, simply look for articles in English.

rss feeds are a good way to read quality papers for free. Here one will find a very simple explanation on how rss works.

Here is more information.

These are excellent sources:
http://www.iht.com/rss/index.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/rss/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/rss/

reference:

Sometimes you might want to know “can I say that?“ In this case a corpus might help you. A corpus is a very huge collection of words and sentences.
The British National Corpus is one of the largest corpuses in the world and you can carry out a simple search for free.
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

In some cases a search engine like google might also help you correcting yourself. In a way the web itself is a corpus, too. http://www.lehrer-online.de/url/google-korrektur has more.

dictionaries:

The DCE online!
This online version of the dictionary unfortunately comes without sound:
http://pewebdic2.cw.idm.fr

Equally impressive is the online version of the OALD:
http://www.cornelsen.de/oald/1.c.115282.de

There are also good practice sheets available.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online. There are also good practice sheets available.

Also good: Merriam Webster, with full audio support. Good if you do not know how to pronounce a word. http://www.m-w.com/home.htm

German-English (1)
http://www.linguatec.net/onlineservices/linguadict

German-English (2)
You probably already know www.leo.org/

German-English (3)
The PONS German-English, English-German online dictionary is also highly recommended.
http://www.pons.de/

It can be combined with LexiTrainer, a highly efficient online tool you can use in order to train your vocab.
http://www.lexitrainer.de/

It might also be a good idea to just download quickdic.
It runs on most Windows machines and has German-English English-German.

http://www.onelook.com
A meta-dictionary search engine. Really good to look up rare/awkward stuff.

http://www.askoxford.com/
Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Wow!

http://www.etymonline.com/
This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

exam trainers:

There are three exam trainers on the market:

Focus on Success - Erweiterte Ausgabe - The New Edition: Focus on Success. Exam Trainer für die 12. und 13. Jahrgangsstufe. Erweiterte Ausgabe. The New Editiond 13. Jahrgangsstufe (Broschiert)
von David Clarke (Autor), Angela Diermayr (Autor), Thomas English (Autor)

• ISBN-10: 3060201269
• ISBN-13: 978-3060201266

Freeway: Exam Training - Englisch Prüfungsvorbereitung. Prüfungsvorbereitung FOS/BOS (Lernmaterialien) (Englisch für berufliche Schulen) (Broschiert)
von Daniel Firsching (Autor), Karl Fuchs (Autor)

• ISBN-10: 3128099456
• ISBN-13: 978-3128099453

Abschluss-Prüfungsaufgaben Fachoberschule /Berufsoberschule Bayern: FOS / BOS 2009 - Englisch 12.Klasse - Bayern. Prüfungsaufgaben mit Lösungen (Lernmaterialien) (Taschenbuch) von Günther Albrecht (Autor), Michael Albrecht (Autor) 

• ISBN-10: 3894490764
• ISBN-13: 978-3894490768

other schools, miscellanies:

Sometimes recommendations given by other schools might help you.
Here is a link to the FOS/BOS Weiden webpage:
http://www.fosbosweiden.de/html/vokabelhilfen.html

A good idea is also a visit to the FOS/BOS Bamberg page:
http://www.bnv-bamberg.de/bos_fos/englisch.htm

Literature:

http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/

Mit dem Urteil vom 12. Mai 1998 hat das Landgericht Hamburg entschieden, dass man durch die Anbringung eines Links die Inhalte der gelinkten Seiten ggf. mit zu verantworten hat. Für alle Links auf dieser Seite gilt daher: Ich distanziere mich hiermit ausdrücklich von allen Inhalten aller verlinkten Seitenadressen auf meiner Homepage und mache mir diese Inhalte nicht zu eigen.