Friday, May 16, 2014

ESL Writing Business Letters

In most countries the basic format for a business letter is just like the format needed to write a business letter in an English speaking country.  Most of the time, the questions come  up with vocabulary and word choice in the body of the letter, or greetings and salutations.  I found a website that can help you answer these questions in a format that is also easy to understand.  http://www.learn-english-today.com/business-english/bus-letter-guidelines.html  (I've also copy and pasted the information into a word document that you can print out https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B91PszKtVKWkcVY2X2pfNEF3NFk/edit?usp=sharing )


Here's a great video to watch online about how to write a business letter which also contains advice about what NOT to write in a letter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egeyiUpFsaw 


I hope this helps!

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

ESL Confusing Words Materials

There are a lot of words in the English language which can be easily confused with other words.  Of course as students of English it's really difficult to learn which word is the right one in many cases.  The only real solution is to simply learn them.  Okay, so with that being said, let's look at a few of the very confusing words.  I've taken lessons from www.grammar-quizzes.com and modified them into printable form.  So  you can print them out read them through and do the exercises on paper.  If you choose, you can also go on their website and do them online.  (Although, there are a few punctuation mistakes that might make that an interesting task.)

Here's the link to all of the files that I modified into Word documents.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B91PszKtVKWkb0d3UWl3Y3kxX1E&usp=sharing

The list currently includes:

Accept/Except
Affect/Effect
And/In addition
Come/Go
Farther/Further
Lose/Loose
Make/Do
Much/Many
There/Their/They're
When/While


ESL Library also has short explanations for some of the commonly confused words.  http://www.esl-library.com/blog/2012/11/22/6-commonly-confused-word-pairs/


I also found a really funny chart with pictures to help students learn the difference in a few homophones: http://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/hilarious-homophones-writing-mistakes-to-avoid/