Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Several of my Hmong students worked on their “Senior Project” this year, and did it on various aspects of Hmong culture.

I helped them out a little bit by finding some good links that I put on my Bilingual Resources page under Hmong (even though they’re not focused on English-language learning).

The sites include the Hmong Cultural Center (be sure to click on “Visit Our Learn About Hmong Arts Website” on the left of the screen) and Hmong Search, a search engine for Hmong resources.

In addition, I also added some language-learning links to the same section.

Mark Thompson’s English-Hmong Audio Dictionary appears to back working after being down for awhile. I also added a Hmong Text-To-Voice Reader, which will “speak” Hmong text that’s written in it. Developing literacy is one’s home language is a big help to learning a second one.

There’s a lot of debate about how much to use an English Language Learner’s native language in studying English. Certainly, a straight translation methodology all of the time is not the way to go.

However, I’ve found that, particularly with newcomers, providing them with access to an Internet resource that provides some native-language support can be a real confidence-booster. Pretty quickly, though, they often move away from those sites of their own accord.

There are quite a few newer “learn-a-language” sites that provide multilingual support from a social network. There are others that offer translation help for a smaller number of languages.

My intent behind creating this latest “The Best…” list was to identify sites that provide teacher-created content; do not require any registration; are free; and, except in one instance (where I identify what my students and I are think is the best bilingual English/Spanish site), provide resources in many languages, including ones that are not widely-used.

You can also find links to the sites on this list, as well as to many others, on the Bilingual Exercises page on my website.

Unlike some of my other lists, I am not identifying them in order of preference. I think they’re all pretty equal.

Here are my choices for The Best Multilingual & Bilingual Sites For Learning English:

Bilingual Quizzes From Activities For ESL Students is a project of the Internet TESL Journal. You can find a ton of quizzes using multiple multiple languages here.

Foreign Languages For Travelers has a narrower set of quizzes, but a wider selection of languages.

Goethe Tests covers vocabulary and language tests in twenty-five different languages.

For an English/Spanish site, there’s no question that Pumarosa, created by teacher Paul Rogers, is by far the best resource for Spanish speakers.

As always, please feel free to provide feedback in the comments section.

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Thanks to one of my favorite blogs, Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day, I’ve learned about a new web application that I’m sure will be on my 2008 list of The Best Web 2.0 Applications For ESL/EFL Learners.

Read The Words lets you convert any text — from a document, blog, or website — into audio with your choice from a variety of voices. You can then embed the voice player into your site.

English Language Learners can easily copy and paste an essay they’re writing to hear if it sounds “right.” They can complete a story or essay, paste it into a Jottit page, and then embed a Read The Words audio player that will speak what they wrote.

It’s easier to use than Scribd, and it eliminates the chance of students accessing inappropriate material (which could happen at Scribd’s site).

I haven’t quite figured out where I’ll be putting the link on my website, but it’s definitely a “keeper.”

January 31st at midnight, Pacific time in the United States, is the deadline to submit posts for the Third ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival.  Any blog posts offering insights or helpful information related to learning and/or teaching English are welcome.

You can use this submission form.

Wordmaster is a wonderful site from the BBC.  You’re shown a sentence with a word missing (indicated by a blank).  Then you have to click on an on-screen keyboard to type the correct word “hangman” style.  You can ask for clues, and you’re competing against the clock.  You can also choose various levels of difficulty, and the game has thousands of words.

The best thing about the game is that after you’ve either guessed the correct work or the timer is up, you can have the sentence read to you.

It’s great for all levels of English Language Learners, though even the “easy” version might be challenging for Beginners.

I’ve placed the link on several areas of my site, including Bilingual Exercises (it’s designed for Chinese speakers learning English but can be played by anyone) and on my English Themes For Intermediate under Favorite Sites.

Many people are familiar with Brainpop, the company that provides short, well-produced online educational movies that are done with audio and animation.   The same company has Brainpop Jr., which shows movies that use more simple English (though the regular movies are certainly accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners) and provide closed captions.  In addition, there is Brainpop en Espanol, which has many of the regular Brainpop movies in Spanish.

All of these services are subscription-based, though each of the three  sites has several free sample movies, and Brainpop Jr. had been free for a year until this May 1st.   I also have quite a few free Math movies under the Math category on my English Themes For Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  These are made available to the public through a textbook publisher.  You’ll find other free Brainpop movies scattered throughout my website.

I think it’s definitely worth the money if you are teaching English Language Learners a specific content class, like the U.S. History, Geography, and World History ones that I teach.  However, I would not pay for a subscription if I did not teach those content areas in addition to my regular ESL classes.  There are just so many other free materials available.

If you are interested in a subscription, though, they have a pretty attractive deal for all three services that expires on June 1st.  It might be worth checking-out.  Even if you’re not, it’s worth having students watch the free sample movies.  My students get a lot out of them.

I recently learned about a website called Word Champ from Nina Lyulkun via the Learning With Computers Yahoo Group.  It has an extensive multilingual vocabulary learning system.  In addition, it allows users to read news from a variety of sources while allowing them to point and click on words for translation help.

Registration, which takes just a few seconds, is free.  Teachers also can set-up classes for free as well, and create their own vocabulary lists.

I’ve placed the link on two different places on my site.  One is on the English Themes For Beginners/Early Intermediate page under News.

The other is on my Bilingual Exercises page under Mixed.

Near the top of most of my website pages you’ll find links to several online translation programs (I recently added two or three more). Students use them on occasion to help understand difficult words or passages if none of their other strategies work, particularly in content areas.

The ones that I link to are Babel Fish (probably the oldest and most popular of the online translation programs); AjaxTrans, World Lingo,  Google Language Tools, and AOL Study Buddy Translator.

Since students use them so seldom, I’ve never bothered to ask them to rate their quality.  I’d be interested in hearing other people’s opinions if you care to comment.

The Wisconsin Online Resource Center has nearly 2,000 of what they call “learning objects” on their site, and quite a few are accessible to English Language Learners.

I have posted links to several in various areas of my site, including Amendments to the Constitution and How A Bill Becomes Law in the Citizenship category of my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  Those don’t have audio, but the Hmong/English Introduction learning object in the Hmong section of the Bilingual Exercises page has both audio and text.

These learning objects are basically short flash presentations with interactive exercises.

You can link directly to each individual learning object, but you have to register if you want to browse through them all.  Registration is free, and takes about thirty seconds to do.

(Hours after I wrote this post, HRW’s Social Studies website stopped working again.  I’ve removed their links from my pages.  You might want to check on their site now and then to see if you can access it. )

Of all the textbook publishers, I believe Holt, Rhinehart and Winston has online social studies activities that are the  most accessible to English Language Learners.  However, a big problem is that their social studies site isn’t working a lot of the time.  One would think a company the size of HRW would be able to maintain their online presence a little better.

It’s finally working again.  For now, I’ve just posted three separate links to parts of their site.  In the past, I’ve had many more, but then I’ve had to take them all down after the HRW site has stopped working for months at a time (this has happened three (and now four) times).

The three links I’ve placed on my website are:

* HRW United States History, which is on my Geography and United States History page under the Sites That Cover Many Periods section.  You can access summaries of each chapter in many different languages, which is great to incorporate in a “Preview, View, and Review” teaching methodology in an ESL classroom.

* HRW World History, which is on my World History page under Sites That Cover Many Periods of World History.  This is set-up the same way as the U.S. History site is, with summary translations in multiple languages.

* HRW Geography, which is on my Geography page under Sites That Cover Many Areas.  On this link, just click on any of the books, then the chapters in the books, and then their “Interactive Features.”  The summaries are “only” in English and Spanish, but a lot of these Interactive Features are excellent.

Check out these sites as soon as you can, since there is no guarantee they’ll stay up.  If they actually do remain up and running, I’ll set-up direct links to many of the interactive activities under the appropriate categories on my site.  I just don’t want to go through all that work again until I know HRW has figured out a way to keep their site online.

Though I believe Pumarosa is the best bilingual Spanish/English site to use for Spanish-speakers to learn English, there are quite a few others.  I’ve recently put several new links in the Spanish section of my Bilingual Exercises page (by the way, Pumarosa is the first link listed there).

These new links include Vocabulix and a site called Learn English (created by the same person who has another great site called Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun, which can be found in the Vocabulary section of my English for Beginners page).

Learning English through a direct translation system can be problematic and, over the long term, potentially detrimental to the language learner if that is the main method of teaching and learning.  In fact, even without my saying anything, my students quickly figure that out for themselves.  However, now and then they like to visit these bilingual sites and it’s fine with me when they do.