I have been teaching in China for 4 years now mostly at the college level but my student's age range from middle school to adults. The biggest problem is that their oral english levels never match their reading and writing skills, due mostly to the lack of attention given to oral speaking practice in the schools here. Currently I am tutoring an extremely bright young boy 11 years old. His mother wants him to go to high school in America and is worried about him not passing the TOEFL examinations. He has been going to a private school based out of America (we live in Beijing) and they have been using a really wonderful website. The problem is that the website from what I can see is for students who are native speakers of English. In spite of the boy being very smart for his age, most of the reading material is way to difficult for him.

What the chinese parents always fail to understand is that they cannot use such material for oral English practice. His actual ESL level would be somewhere from advanced beginner to beginning intermediate. I only say beginning intermediate because he has a pretty good vocabulary and knows a lot of difficult words (which is typical of Chinese students). Unfortunately he just knows the words, he doesn't know how to use them.

Most if not all ESL websites that I have looked at have very basic English for instruction for the students. Greetings, Introductions, Giving Directions, Talking about oneself....etc. etc. etc. And I totally agree that this is what needs to be learned in the beginning stages. The problem that I mentioned before is that the mother thinks of her student's English level as being fairly high because of his ability to read and write English. So she want to find some educational website program which would match his equivalent abilities.

Now my question is does anyone know of a website which concentrates on ESL oral English for students where the subject matter would be more interesting than just the basic usual stuff taught by most ESL programs. Some site which would also concentrate on helping the students pass the TOEFL exams or IELTS examinations as well. I know my question may sound contradictory but this mismatching of English abilities (i.e. high reading, low speaking levels) is quite the norm here for students in China.