ESL Aloud - Guided Practice in Speaking English

The Lessons
The ESL Aloud podcast lessons are designed for people who want to increase their abilities in speaking English as a second language (ESL).

Basic Method
The basic method of these lessons is listen-and-repeat. It is much like learning to play a musical instrument by watching someone play a tune and then doing your best to play the tune yourself. In each General Practice lesson you get to practice sentences that are very close in meaning to each other. Learning similar sentences will enable you to express the same thought in different ways, just like a native speaker of English. The more you practice, the more you improve your speaking skills. It’s that simple.
In the lessons on Grammar and Usage you also get to practice sentences that are related to each other, but the relationship is characterized by grammar and usage rather than meaning.

Lesson Exercise PDFs
A new feature just being introduced ( in April, 2012) the Lesson Exercise PDFs are being added as a resource for almost all the General Practice lessons. Each of these comprises three sections:
1. The text of the main content. This can be used to self-check the work done on the next two exercises.
2. The text of the main content with locations where you have to choose one of two words or phrases in a number of locations. This exercise should be of value for most users, but especially those in the category of advanced beginner or intermediate.
3. The altered text of the main content for which the task is to identify places with (a) missing elements such as articles or forms of the verb to be, and (b) grammatically incorrect articles or pronouns. This exercise will be of particular use for learners whose native language lacks articles or uses them in different ways than English does. Many of these languages also do not use the verb to be as it is used in English. Thus, speakers of Asian languages and almost all Slavic languages are among those who will particularly benefit from this type of exercise.
The lessons that contain these exercise are all grouped under the category Lesson Exercises PDF on the right side of the ESL Aloud screen. The link to the PDF appears when you have opened the lesson by clicking on Read More. As time goes by, more and more lessons will be added to this category.