Welcome to Frankie's ESOL Worksheets!
Frankie's ESOL Worksheets is a collection of resources for Middle School ESOL and International Baccalaureate (IB) English A2/B classes. In every case I have written the materials for my own students in an international school in Singapore. When something seems to work well, I add it to the site in case somebody else might find it useful.
Website moving!
Sometime in "summer" 2009 Yahoo Geocities will close its free webhosting service. As a result, I intend to relocate this site. In addition, I am renaming the site tesol tasks. The new location will be: www.tesoltasks.com
Why do I do it?
It's simple: I myself have benefitted enormously from free resources I found on the Internet and this is my way of paying something back to the community of ESOL teachers and learners. Other teachers are welcome to copy - or even adapt - my materials for classroom use, provided that they acknowledge the source. Similarly, students may use the materials for private study. Any other use is strictly forbidden.
How to save and print the worksheets
The worksheets are not in a printer-friendly format. However, almost without exception, my originals were simple MS-Word documents so it should be easy enough to reformat them for printing:
- Highlight the portion you want (i.e. omit the header, sidebar etc).
- Right-click and select COPY.
- Move to a new wordprocessing document such as MS-Word and paste the selected text into this.
- If the resulting layout appears odd, you may find it helpful to use "Paste Special > Unformatted Text" on the EDIT menu in MS-Word instead.
- Finally, save and print the document.
Sorry, I don't have all the answers!
I receive frequent emails and guestbook messages (mostly from students, sometimes passing themselves off as teachers!) urgently requesting the "key" to a particular worksheet. Typically this is a literature-based worksheet, perhaps a crossword puzzle.
But hey, honestly, I don't have the answers myself; I'm a hopelessly disorganised dope. In any case, I find that it's more interesting to approach a task with fresh eyes a couple of years after I first designed it and just figure it all out again along with my students. I even reckon it's a positive form of modelling (leaving aside my sheer disorganisation, of course) to treat a reading task, for example, as a "real world" challenge that needs to be grappled with a little and - especially in the case of literature - may not even have a definite answer.
