I was on UsingEnglish.com when I saw a forum post from a student asking for help finding a word that rhymed with ‘hurt.’The first thing I did was think up a few words that might help, but then I started thinking that there must be a better way of finding rhyming words.

I am not a programmer, but I do know a little about programming and there is a very easy way to match parts of words in most programming languages. Regular expression let you substitute parts of words with wildcard characters. It is very easy to program a feature that lets you match just the ending of a word to find possible rhyming matches. So I decided to look for an online dictionary that lets you find words that end with the same sequence of letters.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, the Economist magazine is having an online debate on technology in education.

Proposition: The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

I was going to write a summary of the comments on the Economist debate on technology in education because there are so many of them (they require quite a bit of sifting), but I had too many negative comments and didn’t want to seem like a jerk.

So, instead, I would like to elaborate on my own thoughts on the subject.

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.

The respected business and international affairs weekly, The Economist, is currently holding an online debate on the usefulness of technology in the classroom.

Proposition: The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

The debate is concerned with technology in the classroom, but I think a lot of the comments apply to online language learning resources.

Sir John Daniel, in his opening statement for pro side of the debate, argues that, while there are a few notable successes where technology is used to solve specific problems, mostly technology is used as a fancy tool to spruce up education.

I would like now to follow up on my Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students series with a few ideas for using Simple English Wikipedia in your writing class.

I am presuming that you have read my Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL series. If you haven’t, you might want to check it out, particularly Part 3 and Part 4 that are concerned specifically with writing.

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.