Facilitating Student Agency

In this section, you can find learning support resources that you are welcome to share with your students as you encourage them to take greater agency over their own learning, modeling for them how to find reliable answers to the educational questions that they may encounter in their time at GW.

Academic Writing

• Harvard Strategies for Essay Writing: Advice on fundamental elements of academic writing such as essay structure, developing a thesis, outlining, transitioning, and revising.
• UNC Handouts on Academic Writing: This website has resources for writing papers, making citations, specific writing assignments, and how to write for specific academic fields.
• Writing an Effective Thesis Statement: This handout defines “thesis statement,” how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.
• Reorganizing a Draft: This handout gives strategies to help you rethink your draft’s organization.

Grammar

• English for Uni: The site makes difficult grammar and academic writing concepts easier to understand.
• Common ESL Errors Penguin Workbook: This resource has explanations and examples of singular vs. plural verbs, verb tenses and forms, passive voice, conditional forms, gerunds, prepositions, and articles.
• Guide to Grammar and Writing: This website provides grammar resources and practice grammar quizzes at the word and sentence level, the paragraph level, and essay level.
• The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University (OWL): OWL offers writing resources and instructional material.
• Online Grammar Practice: Take practice quizzes on points of English grammar.

Research and Source Use

• Harvard Guide to Using Sources: This website covers the topics: Why Use Sources, Locating Sources, Evaluating Sources, Integrating Sources, Citing Sources, and Avoiding Plagiarism.
• Research and Citation: Links to resources regarding Conducting Research, Using Research, APA Style, MLA Style, Chicago Manual of Style, and American Medical Association Style.
• Citing Information: This site is designed to introduce you to citing information in a variety of citation styles.
• Annotated Bibliographies: This handout explains why annotated bibliographies are useful for researchers, provides an explanation of what constitutes an annotation, describes various types of annotations and styles for writing them, and offers multiple examples of annotated bibliographies in the MLA, APA, and CBE/CSE styles of citation.
• Citation Chasing: This is a help video from the GW Libraries website that will teach you how to find books and articles through sources you already have.
• Finding an Article with the Citation: This shows the step by step process of how to find an article in the GW Libraries database.
• How to Choose a Subject Specific Database: This is a tutorial from GW Libraries showing you how to find the appropriate library databases for your research needs.
• Research: From Selecting a Topic to Writing the Bibliography: Use this GW Libraries guide for assistance with all aspects of the research process.
• Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Avoid It: This guide defines plagiarism, shows how avoid it and how to demonstrate academic integrity.

Vocabulary

• University of Manchester's Academic Phrasebank: The Academic Phrasebank is a general resource for academic writers. It provides examples of some of the most commonly used phrases in writing, organized according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation.
• Merriam-Webster: The dictionary by Merriam-Webster is America's most trusted online dictionary for English word definitions, meanings, and pronunciation.
• Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary: The most popular dictionary and thesaurus for learners of English. It has definitions and meanings of words with pronunciations and translations.
• The Academic Word List: This list contains 570 advanced word families which will help take your academic English writing to the university level.
• UEfAP Academic Word List: This is a list of about 3000 academic English vocabulary words grouped into families based on the most frequently used headword in the family.
• English Vocabulary Exercises: These are vocabulary exercises for the Academic Word List.
• Corpus of Contemporary American English: The corpus contains more than 560 million words of text and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts.

Pronunciation and Speaking

• The Sound of English: Helps ESL students improve their English pronunciation. It is also has great information to help with spelling and reading.
• English Pronunciation/Listening: This site has links to resources for speaking, listening, and pronunciation.
• Phonetics: The Sounds of American English: Sounds of Speech provides a comprehensive understanding of how each of the speech sounds of American English is formed. It includes animations, videos, and audio samples that describe the essential features of each of the consonants and vowels of American English.

Listening

• Voice of America (VOA) Learning English: News and information for English learners worldwide.
• LibriVox (Audio & Text of Literature): Find free audiobooks in English to improve listening comprehension.
• American Rhetoric - Online Speech Bank: Database of text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, and other recorded media events.
• TED Talks: TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. Improve listening and comprehension skills by listening to videos on a range of topics in every field.
• Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab: This website provides listening activities based around everyday conversations at easy, medium, and difficult levels.

OER Resources for Students

• Asking a Professor for a Letter of Recommendation: This resource offers students useful advice on how to handle conversations that require them to move outside of the comfort zone with established authority figures.
• Tips for Emailing your Professor: This "Inside Higher Ed" article offers guidance on email etiquette for students and professors.
• A Humorous Guide to Emailing a Professor: If you prefer some mirth in your pedagogy, this resource will be a great addition to your conversations with students about how to email people in authority in a respectful way that facilitates communication.
• Key Terms about Writing: Talking about writing can be tricky, especially if you've never taken a class that focuses on the metalanguage of writing. This resource helps students understand what professor's mean when they talk about things like "the writing process" or "editing versus revising".
• Understanding Writing Prompts: This resource from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab helps students de-code writing prompts. While we may feel we're being very clear in our expectations and tasks, there is a lot of jargon that we gather in our professional lives that are less clear to students, especially multicultural and first-generation ones.