Online Blackboard

Betsy's post, Make a website for your students, led me to recall that the ESL Services at UT use Moodle as their online Blackboard. The website is basically free, but I heard that the ESL Services pay to buy extra space needed for teachers and students to upload and save their files.

Moodle provides useful activity modules such as forums, wikis, announcements, assignment uploading and file exchanging services, calendars, Moodle Doc, and many more, which I believe share several similar features with our UT BlackBoard. If you want to see the layout of the Moodle system, click here. On YouTube, there are many demonstration videos on how Moodle can be used in the classrooms, and this website is being quite widely used around the world. For teachers who are not provided with online Blackboard by their insitutions, this site would be a great online class management system.

An online methods course for foreign language teachers

Foreign Language Teaching Methods, part of UT Texas Language Technology Center, is a great online methods course for us to take a look at as an extension of our methods class by Dr. Sardegna or for any foreign language teachers to get some pedagogical tips and ideas. The most interesting thing of the site is that it contains a series of videos of lectures and interviews on L2 different aspects of foreign language education. We can watch other actual methods classes held at UT and also hear actual voices from teacher students and professors through interview videos. For example, some foreign language professors share their own teaching methods on how to teach a language during the first few weeks for true beginners or how to teach keyboarding in a foreign language. In Vocabulary section, student teachers in an interview video confirms that how to teach vocabulary was rarely taught in their methods classes. Another video which I find very impressive is one on Culture by Professor Garza. He says, about 720 hours of instruction are required for an average student to get advanced proficiency in Russian and UT offers only 345 hours to a student if the student takes all the available courses for 4 years, finally suggesting an idea of encouraging students to experience the TL and increase cultural competence through the Internet space.

I found this website at Will Slade's blog.

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.