Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Lexipedia is a neat visual thesaurus, and more. I think English Language Learners will find it helpful, and I’ve placed the link on my website under Thesaurus.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll add it to my The Best Reference Websites For English Language Learners — 2007 (you might want to check-out that list if you haven’t seen it already).  I’ll need to “play around” with it a bit more to decide.

Let me know if you think I should put Lexipedia on the list….

The blog Insights Into TEFL just posted about a bizarre, yet potentially (I’m not fully convinced yet) useful site to help students develop better pronunciation skills. It’s called Dictionaraoke.

To quote the site itself:

Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power of the dictionary.

“Insights Into TEFL” highlights the Dictionaraoke version of James Brown’s “I Feel Good” as an example. (Oops, I don’t really know why you can’t hear the song when you click on the link in this post. However, if you go to Dictionaraoke’s main page you can access all their songs, including this one).

Rhyme Zone allows students to type in a word and find others that rhyme with it.  It also has many other search functions, including looking for antonyms, synonyms, and homophones.

But those are just the “tip of the iceberg.”  It has a ton of other options, too.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under Dictionaries.

I recently learned about another online encyclopedia that I think English Language Learners would find helpful.

It’s called Concise Britanica, and it’s a very abbreviated version of the Encyclopedia Britanica.  The entries for each topic are very short and simple.

I’ve placed the link with other accessible encyclopedias on my English Themes For Beginners page under Encyclopedias.

Here’s one more list I thought would be helpful to students and teachers alike.  Though my focus is on English Language Learners, I think native-English speakers of a variety of ages could find these sites useful, too.

This list, though, will be a little different from most of the others because I won’t be ranking a group of ten-or-twenty sites.  Instead, I’ll be listing one-to-three sites for each “sub-category” I’m creating under the topic of “Reference.”  I’m just listing the ones I think are best for English Language Learners (and others), but it also depends on what they are needing/looking for.  It’ll be clearer after you see the list.

Here goes:

DICTIONARIES:

For Beginning and Early Intermediate English Language Learners, The Language Guide is clearly the best place to go. It’s easy to navigate, and has excellent images, audio, and text.

For students who are getting a little beyond the Early Intermediate stage,  I’d recommend Harcourt’s E-Glossary. It begins to introduce simple academic vocabulary with images, text, and audio.  I particularly like the fact it shows words in context, and “speaks” the sentences, too.

For Intermediate and Advanced English Learners, I think Answers.com works best.  Once you type in the word you’re looking for, click “Word Tutor” and it will provide audio to a sentence using the word in context.

THESAURUS:

Visuwords is a unique, and fun, way to find synonyms in a visual display.  It’s free, and it also functions as a dictionary.

ENCYCLOPEDIA:

I know some people have issues with Wikipedia, but I’ve found the Simple English Wikipedia to be a great resource.

WORLD FACTS:

Depending on the information students are needing on countries of the world, both Fact Monster: Countries and Infoplease Countries are good for basic data.

National Geographic People and Places provides a broader overview of different countries, including the United States, and includes a lot of good images, too.

FACTS ABOUT THE 50 U.S. STATES:

America’s Library from the Library of Congress gives a very short and accessible overview of each state.

For more detailed information, I’d suggest students visit Fact Monster: The Fifty States or Infoplease: States.

I have links to all these sites, and many more, on my English For Beginners Page under Country & United States Information, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Thesaurus.

You can find my other year-end lists at Websites of the Year.

Merriam Webster has recently unveiled a Visual Dictionary Online with 6,000 images divided by themes.  I learned about it from The Teacher List.

It’s an excellent resource, and it also has “drag-and-drop” games.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a audio.  Because of that, even though it doesn’t have as many words, The Language Guide is still the “go-to” online dictionary for English Language Learners.

Both sites are on my English Themes For Beginners page under Dictionaries.

I just learned about a neat site from Karen Fasimpauer’s blog. She wrote about Wikibooks, which is collaboratively developing open source textbooks online.  Wikibooks also has a section called Wikijunior, which is specifically creating online textbooks (that can also be printed-out) accessible to children.

I was particularly impressed by its section on Ancient Civilizations, which has some very well-written chapters and will be very helpful to students in my World History class next year.  It seems accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.  I’ve placed the link on my World History page at the bottoms of both the First Civilized People and Greece and Rome sections.

I understand all the concerns raised about the information in Wikipedia and projects like Wikijunior.  In my experience, though, they’ve been accurate and accessible to my students.  For example,  the Simple English Wiktionary is a great dictionary for English Language Learners.  You can find this site on my English Themes For Beginners page under Dictionaries.

The California State High School Exit Exam has a multiple choice element as well as a writing section.  Many other states have similar exams.  When English Language Learners sometimes ask me, “Why do we have to learn this?” I hate very occasionally having to respond, “Because it might be on the test.”  Learning how to write a response to literature, and knowing the words describing literary elements, is one of those times.

Glencoe has an audio (and sometimes animated) glossary called the Interactive Literary Elements Handbook that could be helpful to English Language Learners trying to learn about writing a response to literature.

They also have a Name That Literary Element game, which, if you have to play a game to learn literary elements, isn’t that bad.

Links to both sites are on English Themes For Intermediate and Advanced page under Response to Literature.

Visuwords is a combination dictionary and thesaurus that gives you a visual “cluster” of meanings and synonyms for a word.  It’s similar to the well-known Visual Thesaurus, but one major difference is that Visuwords is free.

It doesn’t provide the words in the context of a sentence, but it can nevertheless be a helpful tool to English Language Learners.  Plus, it looks cool!

I’ve placed the link in both the Dictionaries and Thesaurus categories on the English Themes For Beginners and Early Intermediate page of my website.

I should point out that I recently read a critique from a teacher saying that some synonyms Visuwords came up with were inappropriate for students.   I’ve tried it quite a bit, as have my students, and haven’t experienced that problem at all.  But you might just want to be aware of that concern.

So many exciting web tools and so little time to use them all!  Splashr is a new link I’ve placed on the Examples of Student Work page and labeled it Student Vocabulary Pages. 

English Language Learner students can type words they want to learn, or the vocabulary the class is studying that week,  and, with one click,  pull up countless pictures illustrating that word.  The pictures can be shown in many formats, including as a slideshow.

The site doesn’t have the capability to automatically email the link to the word and pictures, but it does create a url that could pasted on a blog or online student journal (or, if the student has his/her own email, it can be pasted there and mailed to the teacher for posting to a website).

I haven’t used it with my students, but I think it’ll be a big hit when I do.

I’ve created a new category called Encyclopedias on my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate page.  Links to several online encyclopedias appropriate for English Language Learners can now be found there, though I’d like to highlight the one listed first — the Simple English Wikipedia.

I know there are strong opinions about the use of Wikipedia on both sides of the issue.  I’ve found it helpful and accurate.  My students have had the same experience with this simple English version, which is geared towards English Language Learners.

This link has been on my site for a couple of months, but it’s so good I thought it was worth highlighting in case people have missed it.  Answers.com will not only pronounce the word you are looking-up, it will also show and pronounce a sentence accurately using the word.  After you type  a word in the search box at the top of the page, you just have to click on “Word Tutor” to bring you to where you can get the audio sentence.

Many online dictionaries allow you to hear the word.  And most dictionaries show the word being used in the sentence.  But this is the only one I’ve found that actually says the sentence, too.

This option is very helpful to my students when they have to write sentences using the vocabulary words we are studying.

I have placed this link under Dictionaries on my English Themes for Beginners and Early Intermediate  page. You can also find other links to dictionaries there that are appropriate for English Language Learners, including many that have audio and show pictures.