ELL+and+Web+2.0+Dictionary

Our school has many students that English is their second language. Often these students enter school with little or no English proficiency and are expected to function in the regular classroom with support from the ELL teachers. They are often given teacher notes, but because of their lack of fluency in English this does not help them to be successful in the class. Also, in many of their classes they are expected to research topics on the internet. This research may be used for class discussions, writing papers, collaborating with other students or creating some type of project. Because most of the websites these students will find are in English it creates a significant challenge for them. These ELL challenges often cause frustration and may even cause them to give up on these types of research projects.

Lingro is a free web tool that will eliminate many ELL barriers. It will help these students be successful in their classes not only with understanding the teacher notes but also with these types of research projects. Students can open any web page, choose the language dictionary, and then click on any word they do not understand and a bubble will pop up with the translation into their native language. The site remembers all the words they look up for future reference so they can review and study these words. Students can also create an account and save the words to a study list and practice with flashcards. Lingro can also be used with .txt, .doc. and .pdf files. Because of these functions, this will help students study and understand the teacher’s notes.

Lingro also has webmaster tools so that their dictionary can be added to any website. This may be helpful for teachers and schools to add to their web sites. Often the parents of our ELL students cannot use the information on our websites because of the language barrier. This function could help these parents. Lingro was created by Artur Janc when he was trying to read Harry Potter in Spanish. He was a competent but non-expert speaker of Spanish and found it quite time consuming to look up all the words he did not know. It took him longer to look up the words than it did to read the book. It was so frustrating for him that he developed this program to help him translate and learn words in their original context. Lingro’s mission statement is “to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them. Whenever we’re developing new tools for lingro or planning the next big step, there are two principles we always consider. Knowledge and information essential to human communication and interaction should be free and accessible to everyone.”

This web 2.0 tool will assist many ELL students in all of their classes. I am going to share it with our ELL teachers in hopes that our ELL students will find it a new resource to help [] []