There’s a lot of material there. For me, though, the gold mine is in the examples of student essays (for example, these persuasive essays). It’s not easy to find good, short, accessible, and well-written examples of different types of academic essays that can be used with English Language Learners as models, but you’ll find a wealth of them here.

The same site also has a number of good English practice quizzes.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Practice Writing.  I’ve also added it to The Best Websites For K-12 Writing Instruction/Reinforcement.

The questions are good, though the game is a little weird. You’re given three answer choices. Each answer is color-coded, and in order to choose an answer, you have to “whack” the correctly-colored figure that keeps popping up.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Word and Video Games.

You’ll periodically find some dead links, but you’ll also find many excellent categorized ones.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Favorite Sites.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Vocabulary.

(You first have to click any state on the map you see)

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt that a list of engaging (and even fun) sites to teach research skills and accessible citation resources would make a good combination.

Since a graduation requirement in our district is that seniors need to develop a “Senior Project,” I’ve spent some time finding these kinds of helpful sites that might be accessible to English Language Learners.  I have to say, though, that these sites (except for the first one) would probably only be accessible to more advanced ELL’s.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning Research And Citation Skills:

LEARNING RESEARCH SKILLS:

Here’s the one resource that’s probably accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners. It’s called How To Do Research, and its from the Kentucky Virtual Library. It’s designed to look like an interactive board game.

The Information Literacy Game comes from the University of North Carolina. It’s an online game designed to help students develop research and citation skills.

Adventures In Library Research comes from Lycoming College. It was created to teach students how to navigate successfully around library resources.

Students learn some Internet research skills through playing The Gold Rush Game. The group that created this game, 21st Century Information Fluency, has also developed quite a few other interactives designed to help students learn about using the Web for research, including The Internet Search Challenge, the Keyword Challenge, and even more challenges. All of these are accessible to Intermediate ELL’s.

Carnegie Mellon has two games related to research and libraries — “I’ll Get It” and “Within Range”.

The St. Joseph School Library has a large number of surprising accessible games related to research.  This site might be accessible to high Intermediate English Language Learners.

Boolify is a search engine designed for elementary and middle school students that is accessible to English Language Learners. I think there are others that are more accessible, but this is a good one to help teach basic search strategies.  It’s on  The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2008 list.

The City University of New York has an excellent series of exercises on actually writing a research paper.

The Rutgers Research Information Online Tutorial is an excellent interactive tool to help students learn research schools. Closed-captioning is also provided, which helps English Language Learners. It’s still a bit advanced, but is worth a look.

CITATIONS:

Fairfield University has a good tutorial on Using Citations. It’s followed by a quiz.

Eastern Washington University also has a good tutorial on Citing Your Sources.

Here are several sites that will correctly format citations once you input the necessary information:

Ottobib
Citation Machine
Bibme
EasyBib
MLA Citation Generator
OSLIS Citation Maker
Knight Cite

Suggestions are always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

This is a very short “The Best…” list sharing online resources that my students have found engaging and, I believe, helpful to them “getting it.” (Also, for my purposes, I’ve found the Plagiarism Detector to be a helpful tool to confirm that students are using their own words. Plagium is a similar too).

Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources To Teach About Plagiarism (and that are accessible to English Language Learners). They are not in any order of preference:

Plagiarism is from Acadia University, and should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  It’s an animated slideshow reviewing the problem.

The Monash University Library has an accessible quiz where users have to choose if examples show plagiarism or not. It’s not flashy, but I think it’s exceptionally effective.

Lycoming College has a simple slideshow on plagiarism. Again, it’s not flashy, but the language is fairly simple, and should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

Breaking News English features an article and exercises about plagiarism that’s specifically geared towards English Language Learners.

Mt. Hood Community College also has a simple and accessible Avoiding Plagiarism interactive slideshow.

Academic Integrity is from Ryerson University.  It’s very well put together, and is basically a series of animated stories with text and audio support.  The language, though, might only be accessible to advanced English Language Learners.

What Is Plagiarism? is a series of entertaining videos from Rutgers University. It, too, is probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners.

How To Avoid Plagiarism from the University of Maryland is less “entertaining,” but is a helpful presentation for advanced English Language Learners, nevertheless.

CyberBee has an accessible animation giving background on the whole idea of Copyright.

How to Avoid Plagiarism: A Complete Guide for ESL Learners is an excellent article specifically designed for ELL’s. It even provides audio support for the text.

On a “different” note, teachers (particularly ESL teachers) might find an article titled A Different Perspective on Plagiarism thought-provoking. It comes from The Internet TESL Journal.

Suggestions are always welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

I thought readers might be interested in seeing the first few assignments.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Images.

Thanks to iLearnTechnology for the tip.

I’m always a bit concerned that when students are reading magazines, they’re doing less reading of the words and more looking at the pictures. Nevertheless, they have to do at least some reading, so it might be a site to look at when you have a few minutes left in the computer lab, and one that, if they have access to the Internet at home, they might want to explore on their free time.

The language is relatively accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners, and the images are good and the text is short.

I’ve placed the link on my Science page.