Resources

Essential Reading Skills on-line

Knight Library

Janus

Encyclopedia Britannica on-line

Concordancers

VLC: Virtual Language Center concordance program for searching general texts (newspapers, magazines, etc.)

The Web as a Corpus. Use this concordance program to search the entire Web!

Cobuild: "Bank of English," plus dictionary and vocabulary activities

The Compleat Lexical Tutor. Search texts, find collocations and link to an on-line dictionary.

Literature concordance program for Works of Literature

Dictionaries

One Look: search for definitions and other information from many dictionaries at once

Wordsmyth: electronic dictionary with thesaurus

Cambridge Dictionary: most words have one or more example sentences

Dictionary.com: definitions; fund and games; translator and more

Hyper Dictionary: definitions, sentence, link to a thesaurus

Merriam-Webster: definitions, sentences, and listen to the word

Bartleby: search for words as they occur in various texts

Allwords.com: search, translate, and listen

Wordnet: words, definitions, sentences and most frequent synonyms

Word Profiler: paste in a text and find out how frequently the words are used

The Compleate Lexical Tutor (MacIntosh version) You can find examples of a word in many contexts and get dictionary information.

Thesaurus

Visual Thesaurus: see links between synonyms and learn the differences in their meanings.

Reference

XRefer: Cross references to a variety of dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.

O'Keefe Library St. Ambrose University): "Best information on the Net" Lists of controversial topics with links to sources of information.

Webster's Hypertext Interface Dictionary

Reading Skills

The Longman English Pages: Reading exercises with a wide array of topics from theories of personality to types of presidents to the future of health care.

Reading for the Main Idea: Columbia College of Missouri's advice on finding the main idea while reading.

How Can I Organize My Textbook Reading? Tips for what to do before, during and after reading.

American Language Reading. Information on using a dictionary, finding the main idea, identifying supporting details, understanding figurative language, etc.

Reading to Comprehend and Learn. Tips for understanding what you read.

Cerritos College Reading Skills Tutorial. Reading tips and vocabulary help.

How to Read a Difficult Book. Tips on how to read difficult material.

Finding Articles

Find Articles.com Free search of archive of published articles, from more than 300 magazines and journals.

Controversial Topics ideas for topics with links to web sites.