Are you an addict of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or Twitter? Are you also interested in learning one or more foreign languages? There is now a way to use your social network addiction with the desire to learn a new language. Lang-8 is a language exchange social networking website. It was founded by a Japanese student, Yangyang Xi, after he studied Chinese. At first, it was only available to students at Kyoto University, but now the network has open to anyone interested in interacting with other people while learning a new language. It contains most of the regular feature of a mainstream social media (creating a profile, making friends, sending messages, joining groups, interacting with other people) plus, you can also write journal entries and have them checked by native speakers. When you create your profile, you include your native language and you target one or two languages that you would like to learn. You also indicate why you want to learn these languages: professional, school, travel, student exchange, etc. For the most part, this social network is free. There are a few premium options requiring payment (such as the ability to post photos, the ability to download journal entries as PDF, no advertisement, personal URL, no limit on number of messages sent daily). You can check the differences between the free account and the premium account.
Archive for the Category ◊ Foreign Language ◊
If you are looking for a very large collection of on-line education games, Primary Games Arena has to be one of the largest I have ever seen. It is a compilation of hundreds of Flash based education games about Math, English, Science, Physical Education, Music, Spanish, German, French, Religion Education, ICT, History, Geography, Art and Design, Citizenship and Technology. All the games are also sorted by grade levels (based on the UK educational system) or game types. The games are not necessarily hosted by the Primary Games Arena, but they link to only kids-appropriate games. The API let game developers feed scores from their games straight onto Primary Games Arena. I strongly recommend this site if your students need to learn while playing.
SELVA means Spanish and English Language Virtual Assistance. The author of this website is Jessica Ojeda and she is a native English speaker from the United States. She argues that a non-native speaker of Spanish like her is best suited to help people learn the language, because they had to go through the same process. On her website, she is offering her services as a tutor. This website usually presents free resources, so why do I include a tutoring site? Because in addition to her tutoring services, she also includes some free Spanish lessons on her website. You can learn about Spanish verbs, adjectives, articles, nouns, pronouns and others. If after going through the free lessons, you need extra help, and then you can pay for some tutoring with her.
Edufire is a great platform for tutors, teachers and students to meet. If you are a teacher with special skills (e.g. you speak a foreign language, you know how to cook, you know how to program iPhone apps, you have special interests) and you want to teach them on Edufire, you can get paid for doing so. If you have in interest in learning, you can find a tutor on Edufire or you can sign up for the various classes offered on the site. Some of them are totally free, some of them you have to pay a very small amount (usually around $5-10). If you want to have access to many of the classes in an “all you can eat” format, you can also register for the Superpass. They even have channels with classes in various categories such as Languages, Business, Tech, etc.
This site is ideal for the French language as it has plenty of activities for primary school French. Once you enter the site, it displays an English menu with different themes to choose from. Once an item from the menu is chosen, it is translated into French, and examples are given. At the top of the screen, very interesting teacher’s notes appear, because it gives guidelines for the chosen activity: Online activities, exercises to print, language training, teaching, videos containing different examples of teaching activities. It also has audio activities which students can see applied in a very dynamic and fun-songs, games, karaoke-learning. From the Home menu, there are also options of working accessing other languages like German, Indonesian and Italian. You can also download songs in these languages.
Literacy Center .net is a great resource to introduce children to foreign languages. It includes fun learning activities for English, French, Spanish and German. The website is visually attractive for children and involves both picture and sound. It includes subjects such as uppercase letters, lowercase letters, shapes, writing, words, numbers, colours and keyboard. The student can click a picture and hear the pronunciation. There is also an option to print the information.
Babbel is an amazing service if you are interested in learning a new language. As we speak, all the sections of the site are 100% free. On the website, it says that even if one day, they start to offer a service for a fee, the free service with all the current sections will still be available at no cost. The site will allow you to learn Italian, German, Spanish and French.
The site does require a free subscription in order to access the content and learning activities, but it is well worth it. When registering you have to choose your native language and the foreign language or languages you intend to learn. The site offers multiple learning activities all well illustrated to learn vocabulary, grammar and conversation skills. To improve your pronunciation, many activities include audio files. The site also promotes social learning with chat rooms and communities.
The user interface is one major strength of this website.
Here is another great resource to give a chance to your students to get a little bit more practice in math, language or geography: That Quiz! The tool is totally free to use. It includes a series of randomize quizzes in arithmetic, about fractions, probability, time, money, measure, place value, graphs and geometry. Most quizzes can be configured to increase or decrease the level of difficulty and students get immediate feedback. When it comes to languages, students can practice English, Spanish, French and German. The language quizzes include definitions, translations and verbs. In geography, the students can get quizzes for the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia. The quizzes include countries, rivers and capitals all with an actual map of the continent. It is an excellent way for your students to get unlimited practice when studying. It is perfect for parents who want some “extra work” to do with their children. I hope you like this site.
WordChamp is a very incredible tool to let your students practice the vocabulary while learning a second language. In order to use this website, you will first need to register and create a class. Registering is totally free and I tried to find if they will charge you something at a later date, but I couldn’t find any mention of it. Wow! Registering is quick and easy. When creating a class, you need to indicate the main first language of the students and the language they want to learn. It is also possible to create more than one class with only one account if you teach students at different levels or if not all your classes are learning the same second language.
Once the class is created, there is an option to print and instruction sheet for the students so they know how to access the system. As a teacher, it is possible to create many vocabulary exercises and flashcards that may be used as homeworks and include a deadline as to when they need to be completed. You may create your own list of words or you may choose from the database included with the website. Homeworks created fall in two categories: vocabulary exercises and reading exercises. Vocabulary exercises include translation, listening comprehension, dictation, reading practice, flashcards and pronunciation. The interface not only include the written version or words but sometimes include some visuals as well as audio files to let the students hear how the word is pronounce in both languages.
WordChamp will also let the student visit a website published in his or her second language. Without providing a full translation, students will be able to mouse over some words and get a translation as well as an audio file to hear how it is pronounced. This site is produced by linguists and is truly amazing. You should register to discover its full potential. The site supports many languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin as well as dozens of other languages such as Slovak, Swedish, Romanian or Flemish.
E-Pals is a great way to foster literacy, language and critical thinking skills in a fun and safe environment. It is a network to match classrooms around the world for students to have penpals. It is a great tool for classroom-to-classroom for project sharing. Educators around the world can also connect using that service. When searching a classroom, it is possible to enter criteria such as city, province, country, age group, language and special categories (such as preschool, gifted, special education, undergrad, etc). Using that free service, it is possible to connect with over 7 million students and teachers from 191 countries in a safe online environment.
The discovery channel offers a worksheets generator on its education website. The worksheets are available in many different categories including : Arts, Mathematics, Science, Health, Social Studies, Information Technology and Foreign Language.
All worksheets were created by teachers. Worksheets are organized by category and listed by title and grade level. In each category there are many sub-categories. Each sub-category has many exercises. Worksheets include matching exercises as well as scramble exercises. They are formatted in HTML so the layout is not the best when printed.
If you are teaching Spanish, those interactive “Spanish Grammar Exercises” will certainly be useful. They are available free or charge and are provided by Barbara Kuczun Nelson from Colby College.
Some of the exercises are written exercises while others involved the viewing of a short QuickTime video or listening to an audio clip. They include subjects such as Adjectives & nouns, Adverbs, Command forms, Conditional tense, Demonstrative adjectives, Future tense, Interrogative words, Negative/affirmative words, Numbers, Past participle, Present tense, Pronouns, Ser vs estar , Time and many others.
The conjugator is a great resource for students who need to conjugate verbs in English, French and Spanish. Unfortunately, the interface for all three versions is only available in French, but it is so minimal (only a few buttons and a drop-down menu) that most users should be able to get by. Once you get on the site, all you have to do is to enter the verb you want to conjugate and select whether you want the affirmative, interrogative or negative form. If you don’t enter the infinitive or if you enter an incomplete verb or a verb that is not recognize, the conjugator will suggest the closest match.
The French version of the conjugator, “le conjugueur” will let you conjugate any verb in French including all the tenses (simple and compound) in the passive and active voice. There are also some buttons for students to enter the accented characters. Since the French language verbs are way more complex that the ones in English, this resource is very useful for Second Language Students.
The third version is for Spanish : “El conjugador”. Again, it includes buttons for accented characters. For all versions, it is possible to print the page or to export a RTF that is better suited for printouts.
Based on the same concept as the “Wikipedia” encyclopedia, “Wiktionary” is a free collaborative and multilingual dictionary that everyone can work to improve. The user interface really looks like wikipedia, so students already familiar with the encyclopedia should have no problem using the dictionary. At the time of publishing this blog entry, the dictionary already included 314 049 articles describing English language words as well as words from 648 other languages such as German, French, Chinese, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish and Russian.
Words can be entered in the search bar and the Wikitionary will immediately send you the appropriate page in the dictionary. If you are not certain how to write a certain word, it is also possible to enter it with spelling mistakes and the wiktionary will suggest words that are closest matches It is also possible to search word using the following categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, determiners, interjections, etc.
The dictionary also includes lexicons by themes on subject such as animals, computer science, health, cooking, fruits, etc. It is a multilingual dictionary so it may be useful to teach English as well as other foreign languages. Despite the fact that the community is trying to make it as complete as possible, there are still some words of the English language that are not recognized yet by the dictionary. In addition, anyone can become an author and write a definition. It is important to be prudent with some definitions and in case of doubt, check in another recognize dictionary.
