ELD (English Language Development)

Babylon: A free download from The New York Times. This program offers "on-screen"translation of English words and expressions in Windows applications,giving words, phrases, acronyms, a list of available translations, plus idiomatic usage. It's the ideal aid for non-English speaking users of textual English Windows applications, such as an Internet browser, an encyclopedia, or even the instructions for the latest cool game. When you read through such text and encounter a word you wish to translate, a single mouse click will display the translation for the highlighted word or phrase, to the language you choose in a pop-up box just above the word. http://www.nytimes.com/partners/babylon/ Note: Works only on Windows.

Acronym and Abbreviation Server: You type in the acronym (a bunch of letters that stand for something else, like UN, YMCA, UCLA, NATO, and it tells you what they mean. http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html

Dave's ESL Cafe: Open 24 hours a day for people from all over the globe. Idioms, quizzes, slang, links for students, links for teachers, graffiti wall. A fun place to go. http://www.pacificnet.net/~sperling/eslcafe.html

Electronic Magazines by and for ESL Students See what they're doing in other schools. (Why don't we have one of these?) http://www.tesol.net/teslzine.html

ESLoop: A collection of sites for those involved in teaching or learning English on the web. http://www.linguistic-funland.com/esloop/

Exchange An on-line newspaper for ELD students. This is a place where they can practice their language skills , find resources to help in learning the language, and to provide everyone with insights into different cultures. From the University of Illinois. http://www.iei.uiuc.edu/

Grammar Now!: If you want to check your spelling, grammar, or punctuation of your essay, and such, then head on over here to Grammar Now. The site contains information about how to check your writing with it's own set of links to other sites. Plus, you can copy/paste your essay or questions in a text box, and send it to people to look over it for punctuation errors, and such. Note: you MUST have an e-mail address for this to work! http://www.grammarnow.com/

Grammar Safari: A fun activity....searching for English "as it is spoken on the web." http://deil.lang.uiuc.edu/web.pages/grammarsafari.html

Linguistic Funland: Resources for teachers and students of English as a Second Language. Lesson plans, web resources that others enjoy, and more. Check it out! http://www.linguistic-funland.com/tesl.html

Multilingual Web: Links to multilingual computing resources on the Internet, tools for browsing and publishing on the Web in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Turkish. http://www.nyu.edu/acf/multilingual/

More Resources for Learning English as a Second Language: Among other things, it has a link to the University of Illinois LinguaCenter Language Web Safari. (How to learn English on the Web.) http://www.uq.edu.au/~uejchris/stlink.

Tower of English: idioms, games, tutors, and lots more. A hodge-podge of things that might be of interest to ELD students. http://members.tripod.com/~towerofenglish/

Translator/vocabulary builder: This handy site allows you to look up EVERY WORD in a document. Go to a web site, copy the URL, then go to www.voycabulary.com, and paste in the URL. Click OK, wait a minute, and your document comes back with every single word hyperlinked to Webster's dictionary, medical and scientific dictionaries and/or foreign language dictionaries. This is a terrific tool if you're just learning the language

Translation Service: You type it in in one language, it translates it to another. HOWEVER, you might not always get what you wanted using this translation service. That goes for all of them out on the web, too. http://www.babelfish.altavista.com

Vocabulary University: Build your vocabulary while playing word games. http://www.vocabulary.com/

Word Play: This is an incredible collection of sites that will appeal particularly to people who love the English language. It was assembled by Judi Wolinsky, who must love language a LOT!

• Acronym Finder: finds definitions for more than 35,000 acronyms;
• Alta Vista translation service: you type it in in one language, it translates it to another
• Mnemonics: sentences that help you remember things
• American Slanguages: choose a city and learn to talk like the locals
• Americaspeak: speak like our ancestors
• Ambigrams: An ambigram is a word that can be read in more than one way (i.e. right side up and upside down.) Create your own here.
• Anagram Genius Server: how many words can you make out of YOUR name?
• Anagram Hall of fame: best and brightest of all times (dormitory=dirty room)
• Antagonyms: a single word that has meanings that contradict each other.
• More Clichés: Phrases to say in Times of Trouble.
• Anagram Generator:
• Phone Anagram Generator: finds letter equivalents of a phone number.
• Broken Rules Page: background on grammatical conventions.
• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Home Page: A literary competiton that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.
• Canonical Abbreviations/Acronyms List.
• Chinese Character Flashcards. learn 1,000 most frequently used Chinese characters.
• Cliché Finder : click here to find just the right cliché for the occasion.
• A Collection of Word Oddities
• The Collective Noun Homepage: an exaltation of larks, an ostentation of peacocks and more.
• Common Errors in English
• Complex Statements for the Simple-Minded
• Crossword Solver: enter the letters you know, click on "What is it?" Get an answer. (Is this cheating?)
• Madwebs (Madlibs of the Internet)
• The Dictionary of Mountain Bike Slang
• Empty Trash Talk: NOT dirty words, but rather, the strange sounding, mystical language of computerspeak.
• Eponyms: a word derived from someone's name (i.e. bloomers were named after Amelia Bloomer).
• Etymology of First Names
• An Evening with Tom Lehrer: lyrics to "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "The Element Song" and others.
• Fake Out! The Definition Guessing Game : choose a level and a word and see if you can guess its defintion.
• Foreign Languages for Travelers
• The Funny Farm -- Marriage Names : If Yoko Ono married Sonny Boni, she'd be Yoko Ono Bono, and other silly stuff.
• Hangman Interactive game.
• The Heteronym Homepage: words that are spelled identically but have different meanings when pronounced differently.
• InvestorWords : 4,000 investing terms and 15,000 links between related words.
• I'd like to have a WORD with you! Obscure words.
• JavaScript Vocabulary Stretchers: interactive vocabulary-building games to play.
• Jennifer's Language Page: How to say "hello" in Danish or "Thank you" in Kurdish, and more.
• Word Search Puzzles
• The Klingon Language Institute: dedicated to promoting, fostering and developing the Klingon language.
• Ladle Rat Rotten Hut : A version of "Little Red Riding Hood" written by a French professor to show how integral intonation is to the meaning of language.
• Linguistic Phenomena/Devices: stuff we use in writing. You probably know what they are but just don't know what they are called. Now you do.
• The Literary Dictionary : assortment of words, variation or names that first appeared in books, plays, poems, comic strips and mythology.
• Little Explorers multilingual (English, English-Spanish, English-French) picture dictionary with wonderful graphics and links.
• Medspeak -- The Dictionary of ER : what does it mean when Dr. Benton says: Get me a thoracotomy tray, stat!" Find out here.
• Native Tongue -- Discover the Hawaiian Language : with audio clips.
• Nautical Expressions in the Vernacular
• Never Say Neverisms : William Safire's hints of what not to do when writing.
• The New Hacker's Dictionary : slang terms used by computer hackers.
• New Words in English
• Oly-hay Ible-bay : the Bible in pig-Latin.
• On Finally Achieving Perfect Copy : an ode on the perils of computer spell-checkers.
• Oxymorons: "giant shrimp" and more.
• Palindromes: links to palindromes. (The site's URL is a palindrome: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~sssbownj/jnwobsss~/ku.ca.gdr.www//:ptth/ )
• Phobia List
• PhoneSpell : enter a number and find out what the number spells.
• Phonetic Alphabets (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...)
• Phrase Finder: a phrase thesaurus.
• Puzzlemaker : create word searches, criss-cross, cryptograms, fallen phrases and more.
• Rhetorical Figures: all the figures of speech.
• Rhyming Dictionary
• Richard Lederer's Verbivore Page: a site designed to remind us that "ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway and that night falls but never breaks and day breaks but never falls."
• Richard Smith's Compendium of Britishisms: handy when you go to England and want to know what people are talking about.
• Semantic Rhyming Dictionary
• Silva Rhetorica: The Forest of Rhetoric: terms of classical and Renaissance rhetoric.
• Sniglets: words that aren't in the dictinary but oughta be.
• Sounds of the World's Animals : what does the doggie say in French? What does the kitty say in Spanish? Look here.
• Spelling Test : an interactive spelling test with 50 commonly misspelled words. Also, tips for improving your spelling.
• Steven Wright Quotes: sample: "I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance."
• Tom Swifties
• Travalang's Translating Dictionaries: online dictionaries in German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Frisian, Afrikaans, Hungarian, Dzech, Esperanto and Latin.
• Valley URL : translate text into Valleyspeak.
• Vanity License Plates: includes a retelling of Oedipus the King entirely with vanity plates (Oedipus, the King of the Road.)
• VoyCabulary transforms any webpage into links to dictionary or thesaurus lookups. Enter the URL or type in a sentence. Once you're at the page, click on any word to look it up in the dictionary of your choice. Handy if you're just learning English!
• Wacky World of Words : word games, including "Compound Clues," "Numbletters," "Alpha-Spells," and "Rhyming Buddies."
• Where's THAT From? Another word game. They give you 10 word origin or word definition puzzles to solve.
• A Word a Day : another way to build your vocabulary.
• The Word Detective : excerpts from "Words, Wit and Wisdom," a syndicated newspaper column.
• Word Frequency Indexer : creates a word list of any text.
• The Word Wizard: answers language questions, finds new words, snappy quotes and elegant insults and more.