Mrs. Johnson's Hot Links

* indicates other McMahon/Johnson pages

• For teachers:
  • words to teach by
  • for materials in addition to the students' sections, see links for teachers

• To my students: Click on the ESL links at the bottom of the page for interesting places to visit. You can find quizzes, games, and pen pals here.
  • Reading
  • American Culture
  • Writing
  • Language
  • Try the sample quiz of the week. This one on count and non-count nouns is from Dave Sperling of Dave's ESL Cafe.
  • You can review some grammar and learn a lot about Texas in another sample quiz from Dede Woods.
    After you finish, take out your blank US map and color in Texas. On the back of the paper, write as many facts as you can remember about Texas, without looking back at the test.

To sign up for an e-mailed daily vocabulary builder that is helpful for academic testing

(TOEFL/TOEIC/GRE), go to The Kaplan Edge and click on sign up or sign up form.

Print articles out to read. Do this for any long articles you find on the internet. It's easier to read

something on paper than on a computer screen. Also, many of the sites to which I link do not keep the same page up for more than a week.

For some excellent reading and vocabulary material, go to the Bangkok Post's Weekly Paper

for students of English.

If you're interested in a list of recommended books and reviews of them, go to

*Ali Baba's Bookshop Annexe for Students or Ali Baba de colores. It has recommended ESL and American Culture readings, arranged by level of difficulty and by topic.

A book that is in the news (10 June 1997) is Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. It is a

good story about a young African-American girl and her family in the south during the Depression. Go to *Ali Baba's Bookshop Student Annexe to find out more about the book. You will also find a

link for the article about what made this book *controversial today.

A good "multicultural reading" I found online is called "Real Indians Eat Jello."

Remember to print articles out to read on paper. It's easier (and you get off the net faster).

A very interesting multimedia story is June 1997 dispatches from a former Vietnam News

Correspondent's trip to Vietnam. You can get some background/history from the US point of view. It has a clip of Lyndon Johnson's voice and some of his words are written in the article. From 13 June, the story changed every day. Each day has an audio clip you can listen to. Read the article first and view the pictures. Print out the article to read carefully and make notes on, then go back and click on the microphone to listen to a short summary of the day's dispatch (news message)

If you like to read about the *scandals of the day and find out what people are

talking about on Talk Radio, go to the *Media English Page.

An excellent site to see what vocabulary you can think of in discussing lifestyles, geography, and weather is a site that has fifteen of Hiroshige's woodblock prints to look at.

Sit down with a pencil and paper and look at all the pictures in order, then answer the questions. It takes a while to view them all the first time, so get comfortable and prepare to spend some time thinking.

After you answer the questions, you can view the pictures again with some vocabulary provided. Answer them again.

Then go to see the sample responses collected and compare the words you used to talk about the pictures. You might want to visit this site several times for practice. It's excellent!

To go there, click here.

US History Out Loud

Voices of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Bill Clinton, and Secretary of State George Marshall

"Virtual Antebellum"

A Freshman project about pre-civil war Richmond, Virginia (the south)

"California as I Saw It"

Personal histories from the Library of Congress "American Memory" series

WPA Life Histories

• Newspaper Articles, reading and writing
  • Summary
• *How to Write a "How to...." Paper
• *Compare-contrast Essay
• *Persuasive Essay
• *Speculative/Subjunctive Essay
• On-Line Poetry Writing

• American Slanguages: Regional Slang by state

Click on my name below and send me e-mail. Tell me what you did and how you liked it. Make a bookmark and come often--I am continuously adding and changing links (although I haven't been lately--none of my present students, who are 5-7 years old, is on the net and we don't have it in our classroom. If you're currently enrolled (as of June 1997) in one of my classes, you will find useful study materials here that relate to our class work. Summer 1998 Bukkyo University LA Extension classes are found at Bukkyo LA. 1999 Theatre of Arts Classes are found at Theatre of Arts Pages. Of course, as always, ask me questions!

Be patient: If you click on something and it doesn't work, let me know. I'll fix it.

Also, remember, I'll deputize you as a member of the *International Grammar Police if you find a mistake in my spelling or grammar I'll deputize you and add you to the honor roll for finding a mistake I made.

• Links for teachers:
  
  • *Ali Baba's Bookshop Annexe,
    selected readings for students (organized by level and content, selected with the adult learner in mind)
  • *Media English,
    a page of items in the media, including the internet and talk radio in addition to newspapers and magazines, with a selected list of films that are a part of "American Cultural Literacy," with links to a vocabulary page.
    Click here to see pages created for my Korean businessmen who were on a quest for The Real America
  • *How to Write a Book Report
  • Visual Literacy
    is a series of fifteen Japanese woodblocks that elicit answers about...well, I won't say. That's part of the fun. Get a pencil and paper and make yourself comfortable to look at each of these in turn and then answer some questions. This site is an excellent one for ideas on incorporating art and social studies in general and ideas for teaching about Japan.
  • ESL Standards,
    new from TESOL 16 June 1997
  • Howard Gardner on "gossip" in education and an eighth intelligence
  • The Internet TESL Journal
  • Dave's ESL Cafe,
    by the one and only Dave Sperling
  • Education World Search Engine
    
  • The Language Teacher Online
  • The English Teachers' Web Site, by Mark Dobbins
  • Live Text Curricula
    
  • TESOL Online
    
  • ESL Resources

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Ali Baba's Bookshop Annexe

Mrs. Johnson's Launch Pad

The Real America

Mrs. Johnson's Media English Page for ESL and Reading Students

Dave's ESL Cafe

Alison McMahon, Artist Extraordinaire