Casa de Joanna: Language Learning Resources
www.casadejoanna.com/mirror/index.htm

This page was designed to be a jumping off point for middle school and high school French and Spanish teachers and students who are exploring the Web as part of their language learning. Internet-based sources are fabulously rich, but they are just a beginning. Here is a Punto de Partida or Point de Départ for larger interactions within a learning environment.

Portals to the World
www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html

Enrich the cultural aspect of foreign language learning with the Library of Congress’s website Portals to the World. The site contains selective links providing authoritative, in-depth information about the nations and other areas of the world. They are arranged by country or area with the links for each sorted into a wide range of broad categories.

Penn State Computing with Foreign Symbols
tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international

This page describes the basics of Unicode for foreign language and what kinds of utilities are needed for foreign language support. There is access by language, and each page includes information on how to view foreign language webpages, tips for typing and development, and links to other websites.

Global Schoolhouse
www.gsn.org

The goal of this site is to link students from around the world by providing discussion forums, via the Internet, and by promoting special international events geared for students for educational purposes. In addition, it provides information for teachers on how they can integrate the Internet into their classroom activities.

Foreign Language Electronic Field Trips (LETSnet)
commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/letsnet/NoFrames/Subjects/?/index.html

Developed by a collaborative team at Michigan State University, this site provides teachers and students with online units featuring lessons containing a brief description, objectives, materials and resources, activity description, and Internet resources.

Ideas Para La Clase
www.teachspanish.com

The link to “Lesson Ideas,” from TeachSpanish.com, includes plans for K–12 Spanish classes. The site also features Spanish-speaking country information, a teacher job search, hundreds of links to teacher resources, teacher websites, student hot spots, Latin/Spanish music sites, schools and study abroad, and a teacher and student discussion board.

teAchnology World Language Lesson Plans
www.teach-nology.com/teachers/lesson_plans/languages

TeAchnology offers free and easy-to-use resources for teachers dedicated to improving the education of today’s generation of students. It has a wide range of various language lesson plans to chose from.

Search Engine Colossus
www.searchenginecolossus.com

Search Engine Colossus is a great site for accessing information and exploring over 340 countries and territories. You can also search in other languages, and submit websites to search engines.

The Educator’s Reference Desk
www.eduref.org/cgi-bin/lessons.cgi/Foreign_Language

Formerly “AskERIC,” this site offers a variety of lesson plans including Chinese, Cultural Awareness, English as a Second Language, French, Linguistics, American Sign Language, and Spanish. The Educator’s Reference Desk builds on over a quarter century of experience providing high-quality resources and services to the education community.

BBC Languages
www.bbc.co.uk/education/languages

A site worth visiting! Learn to make the best use of the Internet and video, gauge your foreign language level, work a foreign language crossword, and more.

Electronic Embassy Web
www.embassy.org

A great resource of and for the Washington, DC foreign embassy community providing addresses and phone numbers for each embassy. The site also offers information for obtaining visas and passports, news, foreign affairs, diplomacy, and more.

The Linguist List
linguistlist.org/sp/Dict.html

This site contains an incredible number of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries, dictionary meta sites, and monolingual dictionaries and lexicons. You can browse by subject language, linguistic subfield, or language family.

Espace Francophone
www.espacefrancophone.org [in English: www.frenchmedia.org]

This is a new online service for French teachers. The website provides, free of charge, a huge amount of materials, resources, and classroom exercises. You are invited to explore the site and to begin downloading the free videos and related study guides which may be found under the Media/Cinema «Videos for the Classroom» areas. The areas of particular interest, which are updated regularly with new materials, teacher exercises, and much practical information are under: www.espacefrancophone.org/en/audiovisuel/distribution.htm.

Website about African Cultures in Cuba
www.afrocubaweb.com

Today the island of Cuba contains many examples of surviving African cultural influences—Yoruba, Congo, Old Dahomey, and the Efik/Efo from the Cross River Delta (Nigeria), giving birth to Abakwa and Brikamo. In addition, Cuba hosts a number of communities from the diaspora, especially the Caribbean—Jamaica, the Bahamas, and other English speaking islands as well as Haiti. This sites aims to help make available that diversity of culture by putting up as much material online as possible.

Language Guide: Online Vocabulary Pictures with Audio
www.languageguide.org

LanguageGuide.org offers free sound integrated resources for learning languages.

Resources include:
Pictorial Vocabulary Guides—Learning the thousands of words needed to be comfortable in a language is a great challenge. The vocabulary guides are in essence virtual worlds. Users visit different parts of this world (i.e., insects, the family, the farm). They can then place their cursor over any of the images and hear words pronounced and see them spelled out. On some pages, a notepad is displayed next to the title. Placing the cursor over this notepad will reveal a list of supplementary vocabulary. Vocabulary guides are available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.

Grammar Guides—Introductory grammar guides have been developed for French and Spanish, however audio has not been fully integrated yet. Users of these guides can hear the pronunciation of sentences and words by placing the cursor over them. The guides also feature interactive audio-based quizzes as well as additional features.

Interactive Readings—The interactive readings help users develop comprehension skills by allowing them to hear the reading of a text, maneuver within the soundtrack and rehear difficult phrases, as well as see the text of what is being read. In addition, the readings allow students to build vocabulary and develop reading skills. Right now only readings for learning French are available but the site eventually hopes to create extensive readings in different languages, tailored for different levels of fluency.