-Submitted by tutor Emily Allen
Do phrases like these sound familiar to you?
"I didn't know what that word meant, so I Googled it..."
"Visit us online at..."
"What's your email address?"
"You're only a few clicks away from..."
"Look it up on Wikipedia."
"He friend-ed me on Facebook yesterday..."
"Check out our new blog!"
The computer and the Internet are becoming increasingly important parts of our society. It is amazing to see how literacy skills like reading and writing are being used more and more to connect with people and gain information using computers. How many of us go through a week without checking our emails, visiting a friend's blog, or looking something up with an Internet search engine? With these ideas in mind, it is therefore important that as we help our students gain traditional literacy skills, that we also find ways to help them gain computer literacy. Tutoring activities like email pals, online journals, and online typing programs can help our students learn to function in our virtual world. As Nicholas Negroponte, a computer scientist from MIT, so aptly stated, "Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living."
Here are some great resources that you can use to add some computer literacy skills to your tutoring. Some are targeted for ESL students, but many can be used for all students. Explore! Enjoy!
The Linguistic Funland (http://www.linguistic-funland.com/)
With the catchy slogan “Language is chaos! Language is fun! Language is way cool!,” this website contains various ESL resources mainly directed to teachers, including places to link personal websites, gain information about linguistic departments and various universities, links to online journals, etc.
Stonesoup.com: For young writers and artists (http://www.stonesoup.com/listen)
While this website is not specifically an ESL website, I have used it more than once in my personal ESL tutoring experiences. The website contains stories written and read aloud by children and is primarily for teachers to use to encourage students to do creative writing activities and to showcase student work. This website gave me some great ideas as a tutor about how to encourage writing activities with my ESL student, and the opportunity to listen to young native speakers of the language made for excellent learning opportunities. This website also have links to various childrens’ museums, other resources where young writers are in print, and a link to enable young people to find pen pals, which would make for an excellent learning experience for an ESL student.
Dave’s ESL Café (http://daveseslcafe.com/)
The “One and Only!” Daves’s is a website with resources related to all aspects of teaching ESL. As the site says, “Stuff for teachers…stuff for students…stuff for everyone.” Dave’s ESL Café truly offers a wide variety of resources from job forums to teaching ideas to quizzes on phrasal verbs and everything in between.
About.com: English as a Second Language (http://esl.about.com/)
This website houses links to free online English courses, sign-ups to receive emailed English tips of the day and ideas for lesson plans, as well as vocabulary quizzes, grammar teaching ideas, etc. This site is mainly under the direction of ESL instructor, Kenneth Beare, and his personal ESL blog.
Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page)
Project Gutenberg is a website produced by thousands of volunteers that contains over 30,000 free e-books in online book catalog. With its other partners, affiliates, and resources there are an estimated 100,000 e-books. This website therefore contains a huge collection of free written materials that could be used for all kinds of purposes in ESL classrooms for reading activities, grammar studies, and culture investigations.
The Internet Picture Dictionary (http://www.pdictionary.com/)
This online picture dictionary helps students learn vocabulary by linking the pictures with images. The website is divided into vocabulary lists based on categories like animals, parts of the body, holidays, etc. Various activities are available for students to use to test their knowledge of the vocabulary, including flashcards, fill in the blanks, word scramble, stinky spelling (where they must fix the spelling of the vocabulary words), and straight recall quizzes (where they must type in names of what things are).
Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com/)
Randall Davis is a professor from the University of Utah who organized this website as a place for students to work on interactive ESL activities – more than, as he says, “the static page.” The website focuses on helping students develop listening skills. In addition to a variety of listening activities, videos, and recommended textbooks, the site includes links to Dr. Davis’ ESL blog and other websites he has created, including Daily ESL (dailyesl.com), learning slang (ezslang.com), and Train Your Accent (trainyouraccent.com).
Activities for ESL Students (http://a4esl.org/)
This website mostly has interactive activities for students which include grammar quizzes, vocabulary quizzes, crossword puzzles, and “bilingual” quizzes which help students learn new words based on native language vocabulary. Also included on this website are ESL podcasts, and links to YouTube videos for ESL students.
Interesting Things for ESL Students (http://www.manythings.org/)
This site is organized into different areas based on different ESL skills. The sections on vocabulary and grammar include lists with games and puzzles, crossword puzzles, and matching quizzes. In the listening and reading section there are “listen and read along” stories, American stories, and links to ESL videos. The speaking section includes activities related to listening and repeating pronunciation. My favorite part of this website was the Super Quiz Machine, which is an online quiz that, while it can be taken innumerable times, provides student a different set of 20 questions each time they take it from a bank of other 3,000 questions. Other fun activities on the website included spelling quizzes and activities to learn songs, anagrams, proverbs, and slang.
Talking About (http://www.talking-about.net/)
As it advertises, “Learn English online with Talking-About - Your Free Resources to Better English…English Portal enables you to learn English 24 hours a day 7 days a week.” The most compelling feature of this website is that allows students to sign up for a computerized “tutor” to help them by developing lesson plans and tracking their progress in the language. The website is organized into the study of general or business English, and also contains links to other schools and websites for language learning.
Foreign Born (http://www.foreignborn.com/)
“[This website is] your best resource for entering and living in the USA” advertises this site. It contains
guides for all types of topics individuals new to the United Sates would need to know, including sending money abroad, banking, credit cards, insurance, medical care, social security, driving, and information on schools for adults and children. The section “Study in the US” gives info specifically to ESL learners about finding and applying to schools, financing an education, obtaining student visas, information about the TOEFL, etc.
A few other ideas…
LDS Journal (www.ldsjournal.com)
This site allows you to set up a free, private journal which you and your student can write in as often as you would like.
Good Typing (www.goodtyping.com, or www.cursomeca.com for the Spanish version)
This site offers a free program to practice typing skills. You can also access this page in Spanish, which is a great feature.
Gmail (www.gmail.com)
This is a great place to set up a free email account, but also offers a “gchat” program, a fun activity to practice typing back and forth with your student if you are each on a separate computer.
With the health care reform vote, and its passage occurring this week, I thought it might be useful to post some resources to better understand what the law entails.
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