Jonathan Harris, OFLA Early Language Learning Chair
Spanish Teacher, St. Gabriel Consolidated School

In my previous article, I provided a list of apps recommended by NNELL, the National Network for Early Language Learners. As an early language teacher for nearly the past twenty years, I have been routinely asked by parents for ways that their children can learn language at home. I love hearing these questions since they show both a passion for learning the language (in my case, Spanish) and a willingness to practice on their own time. Their advocacy committee recommends the list below with their descriptions. Please feel free to use any of the websites below, and if you know of a great one that isn’t included, please notify me (in the comment section) with a brief statement explaining why you like it.

Learn A Language

This website offers lessons in eight languages. The site is free because advertising dollars support it, although users can choose to pay for an ad-free version of the site. Each course includes visual flashcards, native speaker audio, and interactive games.

The Lingo Dingo game challenges users to quickly type in the correct words or phrases to build a robot. A memory-style game is also available. Vocabulary is split between themes and phrases.

Additional pages with brief explanations of culture, lists of the most common verbs, and an occasional blog are also available. The site could be used as an introduction to a new language, with lots of vocabulary and opportunities to hear native speakers.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library (WDL) is a site that provides materials from countries and cultures worldwide, free of charge and in a multilingual format. The site was created by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions from partner institutions in many countries and with the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and several companies and private foundations.

The WDL was created to promote international and intercultural understanding, expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries. On the WDL site, it is possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world in various ways. The cultural treasures include manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings. One can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or locate items by an open-ended search in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the primary materials themselves.

Lizard Point Map Quizzes

This site is an extensive online resource for geography supplements. It offers interactive and self-scoring maps. The name of a country or other geographic area is given, and you can click a spot on the map. After three tries, you can use the site’s suggestions and support or continue guessing without help. The site focuses on various areas of the world, including countries, capital cities, major cities, counties, republics, prefectures, and provinces.

Digital Dialects

This site offers online games in 60 languages. Click on a language and then listen to native speakers’ recordings of frequently used words and phrases. Games focus on different themes that include numbers, colors, foods, animals, the calendar, time, greetings, and clothing.

Languages Online

This site offers games and support for Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Macedonian, Spanish, Turkish, and ESL. There are songs to download and memory games in a variety of languages. The game portion offers step-by-step instructions on how to make a game.

National Geographic Travel and Cultures

This user-friendly site can help teachers and students learn more about culture and languages. The online magazine helps visitors learn beyond the headlines.

The Travel Quiz link includes divisions by country, continent, city, and national park. Visitors can take the quizzes, which give immediate feedback and provide a rationale for the answer.

BBC Languages

Through the BBC Languages website, one can access an enormous amount of text, audio, and video in a large number of languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Greek—but there are also links to find useful phrases in Estonian, Gaelic, Urdu, Lithuanian, Catalan, Polish and more. There are interactive videos, many photo slide scenes, and links to student and teacher resources in the target language. Those links include Internet tips, TV links (with BBC news links in target languages that include transcripts), and tutoring tips (with ideas for games and assessments.) This site yields numerous resources to support the teaching and learning of foreign languages.

MERLOT

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) site is teaming with authentic material in different languages. Many video clips give visitors to the site a glimpse of how the language is spoken and how certain cultural aspects are practiced. The Merlot is an amalgam of fee-based and free resources.

Asia Society Kids

The Asia Society has devoted part of its website to activities for children, which include stories, art, languages, and games. Children visiting the site can read stories from Asian culture, learn to count in Chinese and Hindi, put together a map of China, decipher early human writing, make an origami bunny, learn about festivals/holidays, and explore Australia, Iran, and China.

Currency Converter

The currency converter allows the user to determine the conversion rates for 180 different currencies, both current and obsolete.

Alien Language

This animated site leads players through a series of games related to vocabulary for parts of the body. The game is available in English, French, Spanish, and German and is designed for students aged 11-14. Players practice their reading, spelling, grammar, and sentence construction skills while interacting with an alien doctor aboard a spaceship. In addition to four online games, there is a visual dictionary and a few downloadable worksheets. To avoid any glitches (working with the accented letter pads or other keyboard issues), make sure your Flash plug-ins are updated. The site was developed to correspond with the UK National Curriculum.

Mama Lisa’s World of Children and International Culture

This website has a variety of international music and culture including songs with lyrics, rhymes, and traditions from around the world.

Light Bulb Languages

Light Bulb Languages is a website packed with over 5,000 language resources for teachers of languages. The idea behind the title is to give teachers that light bulb moment of inspiration when they are planning and preparing. The site includes a Blog or all the latest news and links.

Chillola.com

Chillola.com is a free website for learning foreign languages through games and activities. This site is designed for children and their parents to encourage language learning while having fun in the process.

Foreign Language Fun

This is a website designed by Diane, a French teacher and mom who loves languages. Her website shares useful information, tips, lessons, and introductions for young learners in French, Spanish Mandarin, Swahili, German, Japanese, American Sign Language, and more.

Animal Sounds in Multiple Languages

This website by Derek Abbott includes a list of animal sounds, animal commands, and pet names from children’s stories in a variety of languages. Languages included are Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.