The internet is full of resources to help you improve your English, but only a small percentage of this multitude of sites available are really useful.

Here, we try and separate the wheat from the chaff. All of the sites below are free.

Learning English

English Club
A site where students come to learn about the four skills, study English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, learn English through games, quizzes and jokes, find pen pals for correspondence by email and ask or answer questions in the ESL Forum.

inglese.it
Everything for those who want to learn English. Jokes, stories, songs, links and more.

esl-lounge.com
Site which offers not only 6 different levels of grammar reference and exercises but also a comprehensive phrasal verb section. Includes a forum and a level test to see how wonderful you are at English.

Randall's Listening Lab
As the name suggests, this is the best place to go if you are interested in improving your listening skills. There are few places on the web in which you can work on this vital skill - this is probably the best of them.

Dictionaries

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
This monolingual dictionary site will be especially useful to those students who already have a reasonable level of English.

Word Central
A lighter site which includes games, a poetry section and word-of-the-day as well as the dictionary itself.

Grammar Reference

English Zone
Problems with your prepositions? At sea with your adverbs? Present perfect not so perfect? This site has both explanations and exercises.

Activities For ESL Students
Site built on the principle of K.I.S.S. "Keep It Simple, Stupid". Very basic, clean site which gives students over a thousand quizzes to help not only with grammar but also vocabulary.

Dave's ESL Cafe Quiz Centre
Apart from this grammar section, this site also has an active forum which helps students from all around the world to make contact.

Exams

University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate
All the information you could want concerning all the English exams run by Cambridge, including PET, FCE, CAE and CPE.

IELTS
International English Language Testing System - exams accepted by most UK and Australian academic institutions and, increasingly, American ones too.

TOEFL
Test of English as a Foreign Language - the most important exam taken by those wishing to study in the USA or Canada.