Grammar and ESL Materials

Understanding Grammar

Download one of our useful study pamphlets online:

These pamphlets are also available in hard copy from LLSU

Useful links

Grammar and Writing

Excellent resources for ESL students from Purdue University Online Learning centre including resource pages, handouts, and interactive exercises.

The Virtual Language Centre at Hong Kong Polytech University is an excellent site for clear explanation of grammar points with accompanying exercises. The Academic Writer, a detailed, nine stage writing course designed to help ESL students write and edit academic papers is a valuable resource and covers the following areas: writing a introduction, paragraph writing, writing an argument, tone, style, using evidence and writing conclusions.

Exercise Central is a collection of editing exercises available online that provide practice for mastering the skills of editing grammar, style, punctuation, and mechanics.

The Internet TESL Journal site contains activities, in the form of quizzes, exercise and puzzles for ESL students.

Darling's Guide to Good Grammar
A comprehensive guide to all aspects of grammar and syntax.

The Blue book of Grammar and Punctuation.
An easy to use self guide to find answers to your questions concerning grammar

This site by Gareth Jones contains useful information and examples on tenses.

Daily Grammar. A comprehensive site with archived lessons on all aspects of grammar and punctuation

English grammar contains lessons and exercises on all aspects of English grammar for ESL learners.

Dave Sperling's ESL cafe.
This site provides a useful starting point with links to resources to practice and improve your English

Dave Sperlingis Quizzes on grammar, idioms and reading comprehension which may be useful for ESL students.

Vocabulary

The University Vocabulary Trainer from the University of Hong Kong has been specially designed to help you learn the key words for more effective university study. Includes definitions, examples of usage and guidelines for punctuation.

Dave Sperling's ESL Idioms page. A fun way to learn English idiomatic expressions.

Punctuation

Sentence Punctuation patterns from Purdue Writing Lab. Click for specific handouts on apostrophes, commas, semi colons, hyphens and other punctuation.

Lessons 336-340 on the Daily Grammar site deal extensively with all aspects of punctuation.

Pronunciation

This excellent interactive site from Hong Kong Polytechnic University features real audio streaming with sound,integrated with text and vocabulary.

You may need to download additional software to access the following sites:

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab, includes conversation games and graded listening quizzes.

This site includes programs such as The Vowel Machine to help you to recognize English vowel sounds. You will see words in ordinary spelling or in phonetic transcription. Your task is to choose the word you hear. Transcriber Transcriber is a program which presents words in sound or in spelling or both. Your task is to type in a phonetic transcription of the words. TONI TONI is a program designed to help you recognize the nuclear tones of English. PLATO PLATO is a program where you have to find the nuclear syllable in sentences which you hear.