The prime difficulty with making an effective search on esl-lounge Premium comes from the fact that we are dealing with PDF files which are password protected, so cannot be spidered and archived in a normal fashion as Google would spider and index web pages. So we have manually constructed a database, dividing every lesson plan into level, category, duration, etc and added a basic keyword search function too.
You can search for PDF lesson plans on esl-lounge Premium based on the following variables:
Type - At present, there are "General", Business and Young Learners lesson plans.
Duration - You can use this to find shorter lessons if you are pushed for time or longer lessons if you have a lengthy period to fill. Lessons are divided into short ("Under 50 Minutes"), medium ("50 to 70 Minutes") and long ("More than 70 Minutes").
Category - You can choose to find lessons based on which skills they help your students with: Listening, Reading, Role Play, Speaking, Topic, Vocabulary, Writing.
Level - All the lesson plans on Premium site are divided into four levels:
Keywords - It is important that you only choose one or two words for this keyword box. All words have to be present for a result to be returned. The search "vacation", for example, will return all lesson plans where vacations are used as a subject matter.
Remember, you can choose any number of the variables to search with. If you want to find short listening lessons at Elementary level, just use all three variables when you perform your search.