I’ve recently come across three sites that have a lot of potential to help students with vocabulary as well as speaking and writing.

The first is Live Mocha. It’s a site that combines both the social aspect of the web and the wish to learn another language. It’s currently in beta, but I’ve found it to be quite stable. Right now, there are a limited number of languages modules available, but there are more to come. I’ve been going through the Spanish one. I’ve found it to be very effective in jogging my memory (yes, 4 years of high school Spanish for me). I think it would be interesting to see how effective it is for learning a new language. Each class is broken down into lessons. And each lesson consists of 4 parts. The first is just presenting the new vocabulary and sentence structures. The second is reading where you match a word or sentence to a picture. The third is listening where you match a spoken word or sentence to a picture. And the fourth is writing where you use “word magnets” to write out a sentence. You can also write short essays on assigned topics and upload them to the site. A native speaker then “grades” them and offers feed back. You can also chat with other people learning the same language or with native speakers. That’s where the social aspect of the site comes into play.

The second is Free Rice. It’s actually amazingly simple. A word is presented with a choice of four possible synonyms. It’s your job to identify the correct one. For each one you get correct, the site donates 10 grains of rice via the United Nations World Food Program. The nice part about the site it that it tailors the presented vocabulary to your level. The first couple of words go to determining your vocabulary level. After that, the level is adjusted dynamically based on how many words you get right or wrong. Get three in a row correct, you move up one level. When you get some wrong, you drop back down. According to their FAQ, this keeps you right at the upper bounds of your vocabulary level where the most learning takes place. Make sense to me.

The last is the Word of the Day provided by Dictionary.com. I’ve been a happy email subscriber to the Word of the Day for a couple of years now. I’m amazed at the words I don’t know, but even more amazed by the words I do know. I’ve recommended this to many of my upper level students because it not only gives the word, the definition and a couple of example passages. But it also gives the origin of the words. This can help students figure out unfamiliar words in the future.

Enjoy!

And if you know of any other sites like this, please pass them along in a comment.