Authentic videos for learning Chinese What is it? Yabla Chinese is a site aimed at helping learners of Mandarin improve their listening proficiency through watching “authentic” videos. Often, listening comprehension tools are based on scripts that sound unnatural and contrived, and th
An online community to correct your target language writing I just registered for Lang-8 a few days ago, and I’m impressed with this website/social platform. It is a genius idea and ripe for our interconnected world: connect a bunch of people from different first languages and l
Hip-hop and Social Justice I first heard French-Chilean hip hop artist Ana / Anita Tijoux rapping on Julieta Venegas‘ 2007 #1 song “Eres Para Mí” (You are for Me) when she first broke into the world of latin pop after ten years as the female MC of the Chilean hip-hop
Resource Sharing for Progressive Spanish Teachers I am very excited to announce the launch of the Spanish for Social Justice website! A space for teachers to easily find and share resources for teaching social justice in the Spanish classroom. The Spanish for Social Justice Teacher Ne
Learning French with Pomelo the garden elephant What is it? A series of eleven French picture books written by Ramona Bădescu and illustrated by Benjamin Chaud that explore the world from the perspective of a small pink ‘garden elephant’. It is obvious that Pomelo is not y
A Website for Translators, Interpreters, and Learners What is it? Spanish for Social Change is a blog by Sara Koopman, “a feminist political geographer who does collaborative research with international solidarity movements to support their efforts to decolonize the relationship
A Journey in Multilingual Blogging On July 1st, 2013 we launched the Esperanza blog: Language, Learning, and Culture. Five women with a love for progressive language education, but different backgrounds and interests, came together to share their ideas. Today we have a growing archive
The Wonder of WordReference What is it? WordReference.com is a great set of online dictionaries to translate between English and fifteen other languages. It also has dictionaries for Spanish-French and Spanish-Portuguese, as well as verb conjugators and games for several languages. It
Using Comics for Language Learning Reading comic strips can be a really fun way to practice a new language. As with illustrated books and graphic novels, the visual stimulus of the pictures can help learners to understand the story even if they do not recognize all of the vocabulary.
Porque escrever sobre o rádio Há muitos anos sou estudante de uma segunda língua. Estudo inglês. E estou sempre procurando estratégias para agilizar e tornar meu aprendizado mais interessante. Escutar estações de rádio em inglês é uma destas estratégias. Principalmente porque através
