http://academics.smcvt.edu/cbauer-ramazani/GSL520/Materials/Website%20Reviews

WEBSITE REVIEW - for ESL 520 by Karl Sklar 3/1/98

1. Site Description:


Site Title: Purdue University’s On-line Writing Laboratory (OWL)
URL: http://owl.english.purdue.edu

System Requirements:

This site requires a minimum of computational resource. Notably (and happily) absent are elaborate and resource hogging, "photorealistic" graphics, so pages loaded quickly . I was using a fairly powerful machine, A pentium 200 which had no problems presenting the text. There is no sound associated with this site.

Site Manager:

Muriel Singer - Perdue University Writing Lab

Subject area:

This sight covers all aspects of writing in English Language usage and includes a ESL specific pages for writers and teachers.

Audience:

Purdue’s OWL should appeal to persons of high school age and beyond engaged in learning, teaching and/or or otherwise using the English Language.

2. Summary:


The site is rich in content and links to other resources. It is meant to be a writers "companion" and appears to succeed in that. It wisely eschews graphic excess so it loads and runs quickly and well.
3. Contents:

Purdue’s OWL is a rich resource for teachers and students of English as a first or second language. The site’s Main Page presents six major choices on large captioned buttons:






Our Writing Lab,
Resources for Writers,
On-Line writing Labs,
Resources for Teachers,
Internet Search Tools,
Purdue Resources..



(The Perdue OWL is obviously a huge site. For the sake of brevity, and to stay within the boundries of this review I will outline the first three of these options and of these, only parts. Be sure to keep in mind that all labels displayed below are "hypertext" which link the user to underlying documents many of which will take him/her even further.)

Our Writing Lab is a set of pages which give information about:



the lab itself
general instructions for its use
information for teachers
its staff, hours, statistics
(there is even an Online Writing Lab Newsletter).



Resources for Writers is just that. It provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of expository writing. Pointers to resources are as below:





Indexes for Writers

Online Reference Resources

Guides to Style and Editing

Business and Technical Writing
Children and Writing
Professional Organizations
ESL-Related Sites
Academic Writing Concerns
Listserv Groups
Web-Publishing Help



These links, by their titles, indicate a world of useful langauge related information. It would be well beyond the scope of this review to cover them all so I limit it to the "ESL Related Sites" page.
This page (ESL Related Sites) provides links to 2 ESL related sub-pages labeled Teachers and Students. Each is rich in useful resources for teacher and student.

The Resources for Teachers page is organized as below:

Online Journals


Internet TESL Journal,
TESL-EJ, Language Learning and Technology,

EFL Web Journal

Syllabi and Assignments


•ESL Resources for Adult Educators
•The University of Illinois'Writer's Workshop Resources for ESL Teachers

•The ESLoop

•The University of Washington Index of Online Resources

General Advice


•Dene Scoggins' Annotated Bibliography for ESL Instructors
•The ESL Study Hall

The Resources for Students page is organized as below:

ESL Resources for Students

General Questions


•Dave Sperling's ESL Cafe
•The ESL Study Hall

•The Frizzy University Network

•Studycom's English on the Internet

(Studycom provides a free course in ESL).

Grammar


•The Grammar Safari
•The English Institute's Elementary Grammar

•English Consulting and Language Reference Service

•Dave Sperling's Phrasal Verb page

•The University of Aizu, Japan's Working with the future tense page

•The Hampstead School of English's An Online English Grammar

•Jack Lynch's Grammar and Style Notes

Idioms


•The Comenius Group's Weekly Idiom
•Dave Sperling's Idiom page

Vocabulary and Games


•The Daily Word
•A Word a Day

•Longman Dictionary's Word Games and Vocabulary Workouts

•Cool Word of the Day

•Internet TESL Journal's Crossword Puzzles

Academic Conventions

From the University of Washington ESL Center


•Naming your paper
From the University of Aizu


•Capitalization Exercises
•Using Numbers in Academic Papers

•Punctuation Rules and Exercises

Quizzes


•Dave Sperling's ESL Quiz Center
•Internet TESL Journal's Self-Study Quizzes for ESL Students

Conversations, E-mail Lists, MOOs, and MUDs to join


•Dave Sperling's ESL Discussion Center and Graffiti Wall
•SL Lists International's List of ESL/EFL Student List-servs.

4. Evaluation


This is a huge, in a sense, endless site. Learning about all that’s available and using it effectively will take time and effort. But, to anyone concerned with written English, worth the effort. Its design is no-nonsense, there’s little in the way of graphics. Not built for amusement, this site is literally an information machine! It’s logical orgnization reduces but certainly doesn’t eliminate the intimidation factor for the first time user. There are a number of other so-called OWLS on the web.