This year I teach reading and writing to college language learners. My language learners struggle to learn formatting, grammar, paragraph construction, research and flow. In their countries, writing a scholarly essay is different than writing one in American English. Different countries have various writing styles, formatting rules, and sentence and paragraph construction. Using different web tools, extensions, and apps has improved my students’ writing greatly. Below are various free online web tools and sites for students to check their grammar and find help for writing their essays. For more ideas on how to use web tools and apps to enhance student writing skills check out our webinar recordings, Teaching Writing to Digital Learners and Teaching Writing with Digital Tools.
To learn more about integrating technology to support English language learners, attend our TESOL webinars.
Essay Help Resources
- Grammar Check is a free web tool, which requires no registration. Students copy and paste their essays then get grammar and style help.
- Essay Punch helps students brainstorm and write their descriptive, informative and persuasive essays.
- Scholastic has an interactive to help students write a persuasive essay.
- Students can copy and paste their essays on the Hemingwayapp site and get writing and grammar recommendations. No registration is needed.
- Students can copy and paste up to 3000 words into ProWriting Aid, which provides an analysis of their writing with statistics. Register free for an analysis of 19 reports.
- ReadWriteThink has several lesson plans and interactives to help adolescents to teens with their pre-writing, brainstorming, and essay construction.
- Time For Kids has different sections to help students with their various types of writing, which include Grammar, Writing Tips, Writing Tools, and A+ Papers. Students are provided with tips on how to write biographies, book reports, news articles, persuasive essays, and more!
- Ginger and Grammarly are two websites with browser extensions that help students spot the grammar errors in their essays.
- Read & Write is a browser extension that helps learners write their essays with many tools. Features include spell check and grammar feature, speech to text, a picture dictionary and more.
- ESLFlow has various essay and paragraph writing sources for language learners for every stage of the writing process.
