Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

This site offers language lessons for several languages: Spanish, English, French, Japanese, German, Italian. Polish, and many others. Joining for free allows students to learn vocabulary, dialog, writing, oral skills, comprehension, and more - in a highly interactive format. Support from native speakers is a regular feature of this site using the interactive video chat capability. The range of topics includes more than 100 commonly used language situations. The site saves errors for review, lists of lessons already studied, results of those lessons, etc. This project of UNESCO's International Year for Languages offers lessons in "What you really need to know!"

tag(s): arabic (14), chinese (44), french (72), german (47), portuguese (22), russian (25), social networking (73), spanish (103), vocabulary (231)

This tri-lingual site: English, French, and Spanish, presents idioms organized in categories. After choosing a category, students see a list of matching expressions. They can hear the idioms pronounced and used in sentences. This site offers a new and different feature than most idiom sites: a link to an equivalent idiom in French or Spanish! The only idioms here are idioms with similar expressions in the three languages, though they are not directly translated. By clicking on Activities, students can see selected idioms in animated cartoons with sound; there is also the text of the utterance available at another click. This site requires Flash. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.

tag(s): idioms (31), speech (67)

Here you will find advice, lists, and links for helping students to practice pronunciation in English through minimal pairs. An example of a minimal pair is "alive and arrive," You'll also find ideas for teaching mouth positioning.

tag(s): ELL/ESL (28), pronunciation (34)

This series of free translating dictionaries allows students to search to/from English in these languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German. Once a definition comes up in English, there are links to other dictionary pages where the word appears in a sentence. You can click on the audio button to hear the word spoken in both languages. This feature is only available in more commonly used words

There are also immediate clicks to other languages, so a student could check the same word in Spanish and French very easily. In addition to the translation dictionaries, there are also "English Dictionaries" (non-interactive) available in Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Czech, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic (coming soon). Many of the foreign language dictionaries will increase in volume as the site developers add more vocabulary.

Be aware: this site does include minor advertisements. There is a link to Language Forums. It is probably best to advise students to stay away from the forums.

tag(s): chinese (44), dictionaries (47), italian (27), japan (55), japanese (47), korea (18), portuguese (22), russia (33), russian (25)

This website provides numerous teacher-created PowerPoints. Some of the presentations are excellent, while others are just mediocre. The range of topics goes from astronomy, to history, to French and much, much more! There is something good here for every classroom. You MUST have PowerPoint software (not free) to be able to download and edit the shows.

This site doesn't have a lot of depth, but there are examples of French Christmas traditions and how they have evolved over the last few hundred years. The presentation is extremely easy to navigate. C'est aussi en Francais!

tag(s): christmas (38)

French teachers will find this one intriguing. Zut! offers an interesting collection of interactive, online exercises to help increase French vocabulary and comprehension. The mixture of different activity types and the inclusion of audio files makes this one a truly useful site for either classroom or individual use. There are also links to get to Spanish and German lessons!

tag(s): french (72), grammar (141)