So much for being original…

Inside Higher Ed published a news piece today on Wikipedia in the classroom titled “When Wikipedia Is the Assignment.” In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for students studying on their own and Add Some Spice to Writing Class With Simple English Wikipedia for teachers because I hadn’t seen anyone advocating students writing for Simple English Wikipedia.

A while back I wrote a couple of posts (Learning to Pronounce English Words with the IPA and More About Learning Pronunciation) about how to use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to learn English pronunciation. In one of the posts I recommended the University of Iowa online IPA chart for English students. However, the University of Iowa chart is not perfect. For one, it is intended for phonetics students and, as a result, it is not very easy to use and navigate without a solid understanding of the IPA and phonetics.

What’s Roy the Zebra?

Roy the Zebra is a reading site for children that centers on a group of animal characters. The main feature of the site is the nine-part story of Roy’s escape from a zoo and search for his herd. There are also a lot of interactive reading games using the characters introduced in the story, and Roy-themed songs.

I answered the question: What is Simple English Wikipedia? in Part 1. In Part 2, I shared a couple of basic things you can do to study English on Simple English Wikipedia. And in Part 3, I wrote about why it is okay for English students to write for Simple English Wikipedia. Now, in this Part 4, I will help answer the question: How should I write for Simple English Wikipedia?

When writing a Simple English Wikipedia article, the first paragraph is the most important. It gives you all the most basic information about the subject. Lets look at a few examples from Simple English Wikipedia from the “very good article” category. When you are reading these pay particular attention to the first sentence.

CreativeU, in her “Pod People” Invade Middle School: iPods Get Kids Speaking English post makes a few interesting comments on a New York Times article about a middle-school that uses iPods in ESL classrooms.

I think the key to the program is getting the lyrics down for the students. Watching Spanish TV with Spanish subtitles and Japanese TV with Japanese subtitles helped me a lot when I was learning those languages. But without those extra clues provided by the subtitles, I got lost very easily. Once I got lost, I didn’t get anything out of watching TV.

In Part 1 of this series briefly answers the question: What is Simple English Wikipedia?. In Part 2, after sharing a couple of study ideas, I left off promising to share the most useful way to use Simple English Wikipedia to improve your English skills. So here it is.

The best thing that you can do to improve your English with Simple English Wikipedia is write. Don’t worry if your writing is not perfect. The whole point of Wikipedia is that everyone together will make the article perfect. If you don’t believe me, believe Simple English Wikipedia:

There are a number of creative ways that you can use Simple English Wikipedia to study English. Lets get the obvious one out of the way now: read. Reading is good. Find an article that interests you and read it.

Okay, now for some more interesting ideas. As I mentioned in Part 1, anyone can write and edit Simple English Wikipedia. As a result there are grammatical errors in many of the articles. While this is not a good thing, it does present a great opportunity. When you read Simple English Wikipedia articles, try looking for any grammatical errors and fix them. This is a good exercise for yourself and it helps others who read the article later.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the web. Right now, as I am writing this, Wikipedia sits 9th on Alexa’s list of the most visited websites in the world. Wikipedia has articles in over 253 languages, but, again as I am writing this, the number one language is English with over 2 million articles.
With its huge database of articles, the English Wikipedia is a great resource. However, Wikipedia articles are written in neutral language, which is not normally taught early in ESL/EFL studies, can be quite long, and are full of information. So Wikipedia is not the best for learning English.

The expression “not much to choose between them” is used to compare two or more things when there is little difference in the quality of the items being compared. The items are nearly equal.

You can use “not much” or “not a lot” and substitute “tell” for “choose” when using this expression.

There is not much/a lot to choose/tell between them.

It is a little unusual, but not wrong, to drop the “not” and reverse the meaning. Most people would understand you if you said “there is a lot to choose between them” when you mean say that the things that you are comparing are very different.

What’s ICT Games?

ICT Games (Information and Communications Technologies Games) provides games to teach elementary reading and mathematics; however, the reading games are also appropriate for children learning English as a second language.

What ICT Games Does Well

The games on ICT Games are both fun and well-focussed on specific learning objectives. There are a lot of games that help children practice spelling, basic letter sounds, and blends (combinations of letters that produce a single sound).

One of the strengths of ICT Games is that many of the basic actions in the alphabet games trigger associated sounds. This gives children still learning to read important practice remembering which sounds go with which letters.