Express Yourself (Well) Web Sites for Teaching Students About the English Language

Bring the lively discourse and interactive quality of Web resources to your classroom language lessons with the Web sites highlighted below. Students will grasp grammatical concepts, engage in word play, and poke fun at common errors in writing and speaking.

The product is learning, but the means is fun, fun, fun!

WordCentral, from Merriam-Webster, is a terrific place where students can experiment with words. In addition to a wonderfully complete searchable dictionary for kids, the site has decoders that allow students to remove vowels from text or encode a secret message. Don't miss the Teachers' Lounge! This portion of the site highlights all the pages specially designed for classroom use.

Your students may watch their sentences come alive with Sentence Animation Demo. At this site, students construct sentences from a given set of words. When they have finished, they press the Run button on the screen, and the action described in the sentence is displayed. Students will enjoy creating some implausible sentences, such as "The tree runs over the dog," and will giggle at the animated results!

Laugh at the illogical patterns of the English Language with The Linguistic Fun Page! This site contains amusing articles about misquotes, translation difficulties, and rules that older students will find quite amusing. Examine the pages of this site, and let its collection of related links direct you to some super English resources on the Net.

Don't be misled by its title. WritingDEN is about more than writing. This site is designed for students in grades 4 through 12, and its goal is to help students improve their writing, comprehension, and reading skills. The WritingDEN covers several topics in history, science, nature, Canada, and cultures. Students may choose from three different levels of difficulty, labeled Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs. Words deals with vocabulary and pronunciation, Sentences addresses comprehension and listening skills, and Paragraphs shows students how to organize and edit their writing.

Do you cringe when your students leave their preposition errors in? Do you wish that, just once, you wouldn't have to deal with the affects of poor English? Hear is the answer! Common Errors in English explains your students' favorite grammatical errors in simple terms. Succinct and clear, the definitions and guides are easy for students to follow. Many of the mistakes your students make in their writing will be found in this collection. Weather you use this site as a student resource or a regular teaching tool, you will wonder how you're classroom existed without it!

With Mrs. Alphabet in the classroom, students can't help but learn their ABCs. Sign up for Alphabetically Yours, a free newsletter issued 26 times during the year, featuring advice, teaching tips, games, and more. Join in a chat in the Alphabet Caf to discover new ways to teach phonics, reading, and language arts and to share your own ideas. Students will adore Mrs. Alphabet's games, contained in the section Just for Kids. Upon entering the site, prepare for an appropriate musical welcome -- "The Alphabet Song"!

GRAMMATICALLY SPEAKING

The Grammar Handbook is your resource for information about the parts of speech, phrases, clauses, common usage problems, sentences, and sentence elements. Each subject is described and explained in detail, some with teaching suggestions. Turn to the Grammar Handbook when you need simple guides for complex grammatical queries.

Other sites dabble in the parts of speech, but this site takes them seriously! At Parts of Speech you will find brief but useful descriptions of the various terms with examples. Topics addressed include adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, determiners, interjections, nouns, objects, prepositions, pronouns, and subjects. The site also has an entire collection of resources devoted to verbs.

Punctuation Made Simple -- the title says it all! Take your students on a tour of the proper usage of the colon, semicolon, comma, dash, and apostrophe, courtesy of this Web site. Examples illustrate the specific types of sentences and phrases that call for these punctuation marks. Improve the communication skills of your students by sharing the keys to proper punctuation!

If you're looking for additional grammar resources, be sure to check out another Education World story, Good Grief, It's Grammar Time!

ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Josef Essberger of London is the founder of a very informative ESL Web site called EnglishCLUB.net. The site specifically supports ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers and students around the world, but any language arts teacher will find valuable classroom resources here.

"The site started in 1997 when I knew even less about the Internet than I do now," Essberger told Education World. "After many false starts and much experimentation, the site gradually developed the basic structure that it has now."

What is Essberger's best piece of advice for ESL and EFL teachers? "[Don't] forget the value of silence. In a learning situation, silence can have a truly beneficial effect. Your students are running while you're walking. They need silence sometimes, to catch up, to reflect, to rest, to process. Those ten seconds of silence or 30 seconds or two minutes may be far more valuable to them than yet more talk, talk, talk!"

Dave's ESL Caf is another excellent site about the English language. You'll find tons of resources that you can use with any class! Engage in a quiz with your students, or share pages that will help them better understand idioms, phrasal verbs, and slang. There is much, much, more! The "caf" is a complete ESL teaching and learning resource.

Find out how to send your students out into the real world of the Internet to gather examples of grammatical structures as they appear in on-line documents. The LinguaCenter Grammar Safari explains how you can teach your students to identify constructions in the English language by locating them in regular text, not in a grammar book. Books designed to teach grammar often simplify examples to illustrate patterns, but the Web is not so kind. This can be a good thing! By studying words as they appear in real life, students gain a more complete understanding of the concepts.

THE LANGUAGE OF SIGN

One fun and useful topic for students to study during language arts classes is the language of sign. The Basic Dictionary of ASL Terms teaches students to create letters and words with their hands. Unique because of its video dictionary, the site allows students to select from a long list of words and view them as signed by an expert. Students who travel to this site can learn what they need to know to begin to communicate with the deaf.

The ASL Fingerspelling site at American Sigh Language centers on the hand motions that represent the letters of the alphabet in sign language. Students may study the entire signing alphabet and perform the motions with the guide. They can enter words and have them converted to sign language -- including their own names! As a culminating activity, students may attempt to solve the ASL Fingerspelling Quiz. In this test, letters are signed and students interpret the letters to enter complete words.

LANGUAGE IN THE NEWS

George Bernard Shaw said "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." Your students will enjoy learning about the differences between these types of "English." Be aware that these Web sites offer some words that may not be acceptable in elementary classrooms. If you teach young students, you may be wise to gather examples from the sites and present them off-line.

• Notes on American English Here you will find a dictionary of American terms with their British English equivalents.
• BritSpeak This site offers a warning about common American phrases that may cause you some embarrassment in England. It also has two versions of a dictionary of terms -- British to American and American to British.

Should English be the official language of the United States? What do your students think? Search the Web sites of the legislative branch of the U.S. government to find the latest information on this hot topic.

• U.S. Senate This is the official site of the United States Senate. Visitors may search for information about pending bills, the senators, committees, and the body itself.
• U.S. House of Representatives Also an official site, this resource includes details of current votes in the House, a directory, and information about bills presently on the floor.

Article by Cara Bafile
Education World®
Copyright © 2004 Education World

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