ESL Journal - ESL Journal Enters Second Year

Class Info

ESL Journal Enters Second Year

Students in ESL courses at SSCC prepare articles for ESL Journal.

Mar 03, 1999 -- ESL journal is collecting stories from students in Northwest ESL courses as it begins its second year of publication.

Started by Susan Clark, an instructor at South Seattle Community College in Seattle, the journal has been a test of skill and a source of pride for numerous students. Each semester, students in writing courses submit their articles to the editor (instructor). The articles are "marked up" and returned to the student until the student is satisfied with the quality of the article. There is no arbitrary standard of acceptability. Each article can have a graphic -- usually a photograph, also supplied by the student.

Lab assistants (or the longsuffering instructor) copy and paste the article's text into the journal. No HTML or other special formatting or encoding is needed (e.g., this article is just being typed into a form). Only the most basic word processing skills are required of the students, though some choose to learn a web browser (Netscape is used for production).

Graphics if used are scanned by the assistant, uploaded to the server and linked to the article by name.

Students of additional instructors at SSCC are expected to contribute to the journal during Spring 99, and the editors invite professors at other schools to consider submitting their students' articles. A small fee is assessed to schools to cover the Internet costs of the journal, which is hosted by NewsFlash, a commercial service of Datacore Web Publishing. It's much less expensive and more predictable than locally developed systems.