Teacher Discussion Forums

The Prep Writing instructors at a community college need some expert advice. Our bright, hard-working ESL students do not pass the state essay exam even though they have mastered the material in our text, Real Writing with Readings by Susan B. Anker. All attempts to create a special course for them have failed; the administration will not support it, and the students much prefer to be "main-streamed."
Do you know of teacher-trackable, comprehensive material on advanced topics such article usage, phrasal verbs and adjectives, inverted subject-verb order, verbs followed by infinitive/gerund, etc.? The Anker book and Bedford St. Martins's ExerciseCentral contain some material on some of these topics, but it is neither advanced nor comprehensive enough. For individual students I have tried to supplement with some TOEFL material and some B. S. Azar material (Understanding and Using English Grammar), but it is difficult for both teacher and student to manage additions to our fast-paced course.
It has been suggested that I produce a Blackboard companion to Prep Writing so that our ESL students, who make up less than 1/3 of our students but who are 70% of our failures, could take quizzes and tests at their own pace and so that they and their teachers could track their progress painlessly. However, I do not want to recreate the proverbial wheel. I have searched the Longman site and Delta's latest catalog, but I cannot find any software that is advanced enough. However, I keep thinking that such material has to be "out there" already. Do you know who publishes or has online a progressive series of advanced ESL grammar exercises that are self-scored and teacher-trackable? By teacher-trackable I mean the scores for each exercise are reported to the teacher as in Blackboard or ExerciseCentral. Sites like Commnet have some good material but none of it is "trackable."
Sincerely,
Karen

I have developed some software for:

1) In DOS for learning vocabulary for, say, English/Spanish students. It can be used for any language which uses ASCII characters.

Features: a timed flashcard; browse, find a word and its equivalent in the other language; a timed vocabulary quiz.

2) In Visual Basic: an automatic, adjustable- timed flashcard; an adjastable first word to start and the last word to end the flash.

3) In Visual Basic: a user prompted flashcard, search a word and its equivalent in the other language; browse next or previous words; translate a word from one language to another; example(s) of how the word is used; an option of adding your own vocabulary.


NOTE:
a) The vocabulary, by choice, is organized by subject, topic or class of words -- alphabetically or not alphabetically.

b) It can be used as a synonym vocabulary/dictionary.

4) In Visual Basic: a collection of verbal phrases and how they are used in a sentence(s).

The projects require adding words and examples.

Any suggestions?

(gubera)

kirkupk, I am the creator of the online Translation Crosswords at http://www.innolyse.com/translate.jsp. I believe that such crosswords can be of great help because they are both entertaining and exposes the student to daily news. Although, a teacher cannot do any tracking there yet, I would be happy to make it possible to see how much each student has been playing. Would this be of any help?