@Giang, this question is worth being tagged with some of the ESL topics, e.g. 'ESL mentoring'.

I advocate the use of online corpora for the development of academic writing. Athough it does not provide online editing it can act as a tool for searching the academic conventions about specific writing issues such as collocation use or connectors among many subjects. If students are trained in using online corpora they can check their vocabulary or grammar against the available corpora resources.

Agreed! It helps EFL/ESL a lot in terms of finding the most frequently-used words or phrases. I find the British National Corpus at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ is of great use for both students and teachers.

I use wikis specially the tool pbworks. Students write their essays and there is a chance for other classmates to make corrections (peer correction) to their essays before turning it in to the teacher.

Yiy can take a look at the wiki projects of my students at

ricoe.pbworks.com

Http://ricoe.pbworks.com

You can consult:

http://www.aprender-astronomia.info/

http://www.softonic.com/s/para-aprender-astronomia

http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/sp/kids/index.shtml

http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSes/index.html

http://w3.cnice.mec.es/eos/MaterialesEducativos/mem2000/astronomia/index.html

I always lead my English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students to sources of lexicon-grammatical conventions (tools):

http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/introductions.htm

My EAP students are usually Spanish medical personnel who do want to learn how to suit/meet the generic and lexico-grammatical conventions/expectations of medical academic journals. Therefore, I directly recommend that web (in addition to our class notes/methodology "Academic Writing for Health Science").

Hi - I work at UNSW Austrlalia as a learning advisor for science and engineering students - I recommend the 'academic phrase bank' for my undergradute and post graduate egineering research writers - It is helpful for native and non native speakers as it considers the macro structure of the research texts as well as regularly used phrases which signal a writer's intentions and stance .http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk

I also have developed ( in collaboration with faculties and another university - report writing tutorials for science and engineering .. see WRiSE at :http://learningcentre.usyd.edu.au/wrise

and iWRITE Turoirals at : http://iwrite.sydney.edu.au/tutorials/start/starthere.htm

these resources explain a range of report genres using authentic student writing and include exercises to self assess understanding. Our challenge is getting the students to look at the resources so regular demonstrations and advertising and links from our LMS help keep these resources in the student's mind as they prepare their assignments .

cheers Pam

Personally, I'd be looking not at the present, but at what the learner needs to be using when out in the real world. Frankly, time spent teaching them how to make the most of the text editing and proofing features of WORD would have benefits way ahead of anything that wasn't mainstream. And when it comes to maths, there's noting like the feedback you get from Excel when it comes to getting answers to numerical problems. Let's not forget that educators have made far too much of quick-fix learning aids with stunningly poor results - when really good help is available form sources that have a very long shelf life.

Thank you for your valuable and generous sharing. I have recently visited http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk and found it really useful in terms of academic writing.

@ John Baker: I have to admit WORD and EXCEL are really powerful tools, if properly used. A colleague of mine uses WORD to help his students edit a translated version. I even came to observe his instruction and was really impressed by how far WORD fuctions could be maximised.

Yet, the online sources, if appropriately introduced, are also of great use to students. Cheers, Giang.

@Giang, this question is worth being tagged with some of the ESL topics, e.g. 'ESL mentoring'.

There is a lot of papers that help the writing, particularly in spanish, my first lenguaje. But I don´t know about any tools or links. But it is an interesting topic, yes.