Chart illustrating the differences

Review of ER Characteristics

Surely sometime in the near future there will be applications that allow the student to simply click on a word on the screen and receive a translation or definition in a pop-up window. Even now there in one beta application that will do this on the WIN platform: http://www.gurunet.com/try.html

• For ESL students
  • ESL Independent Study Lab -- http://www.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/reading.html
  • Virtual Language Centre (HK Polytech) -- http://vlc.polyu.edu.hk/
  • ESL Skill Areas: Reading and Cloze maintained by Vance Stevens -- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/4631/reading.htm

• For Low-level readers ('Literacy' sites)
  • KXTV10 Featured Stories -- http://www.otan.dni.us/cdlp/education/education.html
  • Lifelong Learning Online -- http://www.otan.dni.us/cdlp/lllo/home.html
  • The Learning Resources site offers web-delivered instruction using current and past CNN San Francisco bureau news stories. -- http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/

• For Native Speakers - Adults
  
  News sites
  
  • CNN -- http://www.cnn.com/
  • MSNBC -- http://www.msnbc.com/
  • CBS -- http://www.cbs.com/
    Variety sites
    
  • Yahoo
  • GO.COM
  • About.com
  • PBS -- http://www.pbs.org/
  • E-How -- http://www.ehow.com/home/home.asp
  • How Stuff Works -- http://www.howstuffworks.com/
    • Sample: How hair coloring works
      http://www.howstuffworks.com/hair-coloring.htm

• For Native Speakers - Kids
  • Kids Click! -- http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/
    "Web search for kids by librarians"
    
  • Yahooligans
    
  • Excite: For kids
    

• Guidance in topic & page selection
• Methods of tracking reading progress
  • The Reading Log

    Students maintain a notebook with summaries of what they have read. It should include the URL and date of access. Students could also keep a record of new or interesting vocabulary and expressions encountered, or write a review of the site.

  • Bookmark collection

    Students can build a bookmark collection on a floppy disk for submission.

  • Link collection

    Similar to the above, but the students maintain their link collection as a word-processor document. (If MS Word, then the links should still be clickable. Be sure that the students enter the 'http://' part of each URL.)

  • Downloading text onto floppy

    Students can routinely save the text of each site onto their floppy using the SAVE AS/Text function of their browser.