By Natasha Nixon 

The internet has made it much easier to learn English by providing many tools for use by anyone, anywhere. That means that everybody in the world, not matter where you come from, can study English online. Study materials, even puzzles and games, and easy reading texts are readily available at no cost for public use. You Tube has several videos where you can listen and read along to learn both vocabulary and pronunciation.

The website ESL Desk has a wide variety of easy reading books for use, and to make the learning process easier, each word has been turned into a link. If you come across a word that you do not recognize or understand, you can click on the link and go directly to the definition and translation for that word.

There are children’s books such as Aesop’s Fables, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis available here. There are also offerings of science fiction, horror, mystery detective, and science and philosophy. You can also download the ESL reader and search for books at Project Guttenberg.

At ManyThings.org, there are stories, games, quizzes, and just about any other type of program available to those wanting to learn English as a second language. There is an entire series of short stories, on subjects from animals to space exploration and everything in between. If you select animals, you may discover stories about bats, or even a shark. The audio files that go along with many of the stories are helpful, and those that do not have audio are clearly marked.

a4esl.org/ has a number of activities to help your learning experience. There are grammar and vocabulary quizzes in easy, medium and hard levels, as well as exercises and puzzles.

An excellent resource available for free is www.ipl.org/div/storyhour/. Here you will find such stories as The Lilypad, It’s Magic, Do Spiders Live on the World Wide Web? Mother Goose on the Web, The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Fisherman and His Wife. These stories contain illustrations and audio files as well.

Making use of the many available internet resources can make learning English a much easier, and more enjoyable, undertaking. So have fun!