For those of you who are not my students, I am an English teacher in Toluca, Mexico, about 50 miles west of Mexico City. I teach advanced English to mostly college students at ITESM, sometimes called the "MIT of Latin America".

My Advanced B classes have very very bright students in them, who score 550 or higher on the TOEFL exam before entering the "professional" (college) program. Many of them have 600 or higher and tend to be more ambitious then the average student. For this reason, I have decided to use Wikipedia as the focus and goal of the course. Their final project is to write a completely new article for Wikipedia that is appropriate to the intended audience and of course follows the basic conventions of English composition. I also want to give them a chance to do some "authentic" work in English, meaning what they produce will not just be for me, the teacher, but for the real world as well.

To do this, they will have to learn the conventions of style and how to be a "good" Wikipedian, meaning they will have to learn and put into practice cultural adaptation. The main goal of my class is to show my students that being a proficient speaker of a foreign language means more than just mastering grammar and vocabulary -- it means learning how to adapt oneself socially to the new situations that speaking that language will provide them.

If any of you are interested in this project and/or wish to mentor any of my students (As Richard as been so gracious to me), please contact me on my discussion page.

To my students:

I sincerely hope you will enjoy and learn a lot from this semester's project and class. The most important quality you will need (as all of you are without a doubt smart enough) to get the most out of this course is the willingness to challenge yourself and to be determined not to let the setbacks you face (and we all face them in an unknown environment!) get the better of you. The only way to learn to write and to learn how to interact in a "foreign" environment is to do it. The purpose of the course is to give you an "semi-guided" introduction to this kind of environment (which includes how the course is conducted), but this does not mean that I will "hand-hold" you through it. That means that you need to make a good-faith effort to find answers on your own. This why you will be doing many of your projects and other assignments in groups. "Two heads (or 3 or 4) are better than one." Help each other. Don't just divide the work.

Wow! What a quick response I have received from the Wiki community!!!! I will list those of you who responded to my request for help for my students here. In this way, my students will have a short cut in finding people willing and able to help them with their assignments.