Essays in both written and listening forms

The online website of National Public Radio (NPR) provides archives of news articles, some of which are accompanied by their radio versions. Although this website is not specifically designed for educators, ESL teachers will greatly benefit from ths site in that it provides authentic reading and listening materials.

Especially, "This I Believe" essays are ample authentic resources for all language skills, namely, listening, writing, speaking, reading, and even pronunciation. Originally, there was a radio program of the same name in the 1950s, and some people revived the program by collecting short essays on personal beliefs and featuring some of them on NPR from 2005-2009. The website has an archieve of the essays both from the 1950s and from the recent. They provide both written and listening formats of each essay. These essays are so widely used for educational purpose around the world that the site provides several tips on how to use the essays For Educators. It provides sample curricula for middle, high, college, and adult learners as well as the brochure and poster containing tips on writing one's own This I Believe essay, all in PDF files, which are just amazing.

I got to know this site from Dr. McGregor's pronunciation class.

Online Dictionaries

• Dictionary.com - This online dictionary is the one I use most frequently. It provides ample definitions and expressions, and Thesaurus is greatly helpful for ESL writers. There is also Translator for over 50 langauges from word level to sentence level, but, I found the work of translation not reliable.
• Merriam-Webster Online - This one also provides dictoinary and thesaursus, similar to Dictionary.com, I would say.
• Cambridge Dictionaries Online - This online dictionary provides both US and British pronunciation samples which a learner can actually listen to. It also has several sub-dictionaries such as Advanced Learner's, Learner's, American English, Idioms, and Phrasal Verbs, among which I like the last two most. They provide ample explanations and examples of idioms of a word, which is really helpful for English learners in that they generally have a weakness with idioms or formulaic expressions.
• Oxford Dictionaries Online - This online dictionary offers two versions of dictionaries, US English and World English, and you can choose one of the two options at the front page. On the top menu, right by Dictionary, there is the menu of "Better Writing" which offers useful tips on grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and writing. Especially, I find the section of "Improve your English" very helpful; that is, it works on nuances (bored by, of, and with), easily confused words (ex. affect and effect), and a list of different British and American terms (ex. dustbin and garage can)
• MSN Encarta - This one also provide both US and World English dictionaries as well as Thesaurus and Translations (which is basically English-other languages dictionaries). These dictionaries are only good for one-word lookup since they have limited entries for idioms/expressions and they do not provide many sentence examples, some of words and expressions only with definitions.
• Urbandictionary.com - This is a slang dictionary, made and constantly edited by users, so I would call it a wiki-dictionary. Since due to the Internet, English learners access to "authentic" expressions which are sometimes not found in traditional dictionaries, I have found this online dictionary very useful and helpful.
• google.com - This search engine is useful for ESL writers since it provides enormous databases including "language corpora," and by online searching, "a student can find which words in a language tend to go together, a phenomenon called collocation" (Horwitz, 2008, p. 144). When you are not certain about a certain English expression or idiom, you can search it through google.com and comparing how many results are found, you can decide which one is more widely used.

Teachers of ESL/EFL classes at all levels should explicitly teach how to use online dictionaries, promoting autonomous learning both inside and outside of the classroom and both current and future semesters. ESL writing teachers should also teach how to use thesauruses to find antonyms and synonyms. The last, but not the least, resource which teachers should teach is how to use online search engines which scan through diverse texts so that learners are able to check actual usages of English.

Two sites for writing reference material

From Will's blog, Slade's Language Teaching Blog, I found two precious sites for writing reference resources which are greatly helpful for both teachers and students.

Undergraduate Writing Center of the University of Texas at Austin developed an online version of the consulting services of the center for those students who have to work on writing on their own without visiting the UWC. The online writing center is called Virgil, and unlike many other writing help sites which sometimes add more confusion to visitors, Virgil is very neatly organized according to writing stages and easy to find a resource one is looking for. Anyone who needs tips for writing can refer to this site for English grammar, writing format, citation, punctuation, and many more. The site provides "Writing Handouts" both in the HTML and PDF versions, which teachers can print out for their students. Looking around this site, I felt like I've got a private writing tutor.

Guide to Grammar and Writing provided by the Capital Community College Foundation is also another useful site. It might take a while to get familiar with this site at first, but once done, it provides an enormous amount of references for English grammar and composition. Principles of Composition, as a part of the site, is specifically focused on composition. One of the strengths of this site is that they provide ample explanations and examples for each grammatical point or writing principle. I believe this site would be a great reference site especially for teachers.