Cambridge Student Arcades

Cambridge University Press publishes many ESL textbooks, and they're putting a lot of the related audio on the web for anyone to download. They also have specific listening exercises for many of the chapters. Go to their Student Arcades page and select one of the textbooks and then the book level (most of the books would be for lower-level EAP classes.) Next, either download self-study audio, or click on "sort by activity type". The listening exercises are called "What do you hear?"

English Central

English Central is mainly a collection of existing videos, rather than a producer of content. They do, however, add some significant value.  First, they rank the videos for different English proficiency levels. Then, they add subtitles and provide an easy to use viewer. Next, they encourage students to record themselves speaking the lines from the video and use speech recognition software to indicate whether these have been spoken correctly or not. They also have vocabulary lists.

Overall, I think the main value is in the ranked, subtitled videos. The pronunciation check is not likely to be very effective and the glosses for the vocabulary vary a good deal in terms of how easy/accurate they are. Nevertheless, there is a large amount of material available, and it's worth checking out.

To make your own MP3

This is great for teachers and students. Just load the website, click to record, and share. Couldn't be easier.

English Accent Coach

This website is being put together by Ron Thomson out of Brock U. It's currently in Beta, and will be changing a bit in the next few weeks, but it looks quite useful for helping learning hear the distinction between sounds. It's also likely good for TESL students learning about phonology and pronunciation.


It's a game-like interface that plays syllables or words containing target phonemes that have to then be identified. The sound quality is high and the the pronunciations are varied but natural. I would strongly recommend using earphones rather than speakers.