Over the past couple of weeks we have been concentrating on building a directory of great resources for language learners. There really is a lot going on in SLA (second language acquisition) online. A couple of sites that caught my eye were Wordia and Yappr.
Wordia gives you the opportunity to record a definition of any English word. I thought this would be interesting for learners & was looking at linking through to the relevant Wordia page from the widget. Unfortunately there aren’t a huge number of definitions on the site yet - though those that are there are interesting and entertaining. None of today’s learnit words were on the site, for example.
One of my students asked if I knew of any sites where she could find voice recordings alongside transcripts of the text - something really useful for language learners. As soon as I found out about Yappr I distributed it to my English students. I recommend my students spend at least a few minutes every day listening to the radio or watching TV in English - it really helps their pronunciation - even if they don’t understand what they’re listening to. Because they find the BBC site difficult to navigate, I’ve been putting together a Google Reader list of resources here.
Yappr is great because it allows you to watch a video and see the text of a transcription at the same time. Unfortunately it only caters for English learners - I would love to have this resource to help me with my Czech language. Also, there are a limited number of videos on the site at the moment - and mainly American politics or music videos. It’s essential that learners are exposed to a range of different accents, so I uploaded some content to the site but then was unable to add the transcript, which was disappointing. The only other criticism I have of it would be that the name was instantly forgettable (just like Quisition) - it took me some time to find the site again after I left it. It’s so web 2.o to have a made up word as a name, but many sites lose potential customers because of it.
If I can figure it out, I want to add a daily video to learnit, with content from Wordia put through Yappr. I’m really looking forward to speaking the the Yappr people - I hope we can work together. Maybe we need to get together and talk API.
Finally, we had a nice review this week on the simplehuman.com blog. Check it out.
