Resources for improving your English

Galenet: Excellent database for research related to any novel or author. Articles of all lengths. To access this from your home, you must do a simple configuration of your proxy settings. See this document for instructions.

New York Times. All the news that's fit to print. Also with video page.

CNN Headline news, articles and video clips from an American source.

BBC Headline news, articles and video clips from a British source.

Al Jazeera Headline news, articles and video clips from an Arabic source.

Taiwan News On-line version of the Taiwan English language newspaper.

China Post On-line version of the Taiwan English language newspaper.

Taipei Times On-line version of the Taiwan English language newspaper.

ICRT Local Taiwan English radio station with language learning helps.

Weather Local Taiwan weather from the Central Weather Bureau

NPR radio USA National Public Radio. Links to many interesting radio shows, long and short.

The Onion Ironic Newspaper in English. Includes short video clips, radio clips, and articles

Wordle: Create word art or “word clouds” from text that you provide.
No login required. Words used more often are larger.

Wordnik is a dictionary and much more. A great way to explore word meanings and see words in context.

Stringnet: Find words in collocations and collocations in context. Great for seeing how words work together at different levels of meaning.

UWill Toolbar From the makers of Stringnet. This works with your browser to help you learn vocabulary when surfing the web

Phrase.in: Type in phrases to check their popularity and see examples.

PhraseUp: Helps you find that word in your sentence or phrase that you just can’t quite think of.

Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world. Listen and record, words and phrases in hundreds of languages

HowJsay is a free online Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation. It is especially good for listening to intonation and stress in common phrases and sentences.

PhoTransEdit: Translate English text into phonetic script of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Transl8it: Translate to and from texting lingo.

Dvolver: Make your own cheesy animated short films.

Makebelief Comics: Create your own comic strips with dialogue.

Xtranormal: Create weird and interesting animated scenes with longer dialogues and motion. Good for news reports.

Voxopop: This is a like email with voice. Have voice discussions with others about lots of different topics.

VYou: Video recordings of people from around the world asking and answering questions. You can join them.

Write or die: Use the web application to type. Set a word or time goal and if you stop typing, there will be consequences. Use this to help you write for fluency, not for accuracy and to generate ideas. 

Sync In Write on the same document with someone else in real time even though you are on different computers.

CuePrompter is an online teleprompter. Use it to help manage your reading speed or to practice for becoming a newscaster.

Classic Short Stories

A great site for finding great short stories to read. These are some of the most famous and interesting.

Bat Lyrics: A huge library of music videos with lyrics and other music industry information.

Flickr Poet Paste in a poem or story, or part of a poem or story and FlickrPost will find photos to match.

Twurdy is a search engine that gives a readability score to websites, so you can predict how difficult or easy it will be to read.

WallWisher Create noticeboards to be viewed and shared by members of your group. Share and arrange short updates, questions, and answers on virtual postit notes.