If you are a TEFL teacher you'll find the web is awash with great sites for English language learners - and harnessing these and having a stock of the best ones is obviously helpful for teachers of English. You'll also get extra brownie points for keeping abreast of the latest and most relevant learner sites and tools. After all, few course books will have much on the economic crisis or Barrack Obama's inauguration; but you can bet the internet does with neat articles perhaps already ‘treated,' ripe for the language learner interested in current affairs.

Lets' start with one of my favourites: Onestop English. While most of this site is subscription based, check out their free-to-view news articles, adapted from the Guardian weekly and neatly treated for level. There's a fresh article every month and following each reading there are a comprehensive set of language activities with answer key; perfect for the classroom or self-study. In these tough economic times, my favourite of relevance is the article entitled ‘French tighten their belts; super for  comparison of how the downturn is affecting other nationalities and industry sectors. Go have a look.

For listening and pronunciation activities, these 2 sites are hard to beat: The British Council and the BBC's special learning English site. While I don't find either the easiest to navigate, a bit of digging will uncover some gems; like this advanced pronunciation poem on the British Council's site. And this, on connected speech and the most common sound in English, the schwa from the BBC.

The BBC also has their own answer to the one-stop news articles mentioned earlier. On their ‘Words in the News' section of their learner English site you can read and listen to the articles; a huge advantage. However, they tend to be shorter than the one-stop articles, don't have the follow-up activities and are not graded for level. Still, they are definitely worth a look - and a listen.

A personal favourite is the one on obesity in English kids. But don't let your European students sneer at our English eating habits and food; did you know it is Italian teenagers who are most at risk from obesity in Europe?

If you need some discussion questions in a hurry, then there's a myriad here at IELTS questions with discussion points from manners to politics. A superb ready to print-and-go site.

Now for grammar. While a google search on something like, ‘present perfect explained' might be best for individual grammar queries, this comprehensive site with questions and advice on all things grammar is also useful. It's not the most visually appealing as sites go, but there's a lot for the teacher here. You might also find this Irregular verbs list helpful and the explanations and online quizzes on Conditional sentences are really clear as well.

To finish, I'm going to cheat a little. I'm going to recommend a site that's not free. Sorry, but I absolutely love Handouts Online and for only 22USD per year, it's as good as free. For range (from grammar to discussion), simplicity (all are pdf documents) and ease of navigation, this has to be the best value site around. We love it so much we give a free 1 year's subscription to all those taking any of our one-to-one TESOL courses.

If you know of any more great sites, let me know and we may even publish a ‘best free sites 2'.

In the meantime, if you haven’t joined our community on Facebook, you’re missing out on half the fun!  Our Facebook page is the perfect place to ask your TEFL questions and get answers directly from me. Join now

Louisa Walsh