Guide to Grammar and Writing REVIEW

Name:
Guide to Grammar and Writing at http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/

Skill:
The skills concentrated on are Grammar and writing but being as this is a text based website, reading is also integrated.

Level:
low-intermediate and up (L2 writing using Niagara College’s levels)

Interactive:
Definitely. I very much like that students can have the site grade their performance on many activities. Many sites seem to have this option, but it seems less valuable when there is only a single quiz on a certain subject. If you were to do badly, the information would not be of much use because it wouldn’t help you much to take the exact same test again.

ESL/Non-ESL:
It is not specifically designed for ESL students but it could certainly be useful for both ESL students (as a reference of grammar/writing structures as well as a source of practice exercises). It also gives you a message when you click on certain activities that says “This activity is probably more appropriate for ESL students than Native Speakers.”

What makes it good?
The site itself is fairly user friendly and easy to navigate. It has a quite a wealth of information and activities and they are well organized and easy to find. Being a site that specializes in Grammar in Writing has allowed categorizing the information within in a highly useful way. The main categories are “Word and sentence level”, “paragraph level”, “essay and research paper” etc… If you were teaching a writing course, this would allow you to find pertinent information quickly based on topic rather than level. This is also useful I feel for keeping the information adaptable. Even when exercises are involved, ESL level terminology is not used. If you wanted to use a recognizing prepositions activity” you could find one quickly, put it into “Word” and change it to meets the needs of your level.

Finding the insight link to the “Guide to grammar and writing” from the homepage http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/ was a little difficult. For anyone planning to use this resource in the future I would suggest saving “http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/” as the link.