Library Resources for Multilingual Students: Tools for English Language Learners

The OWL is a wonderful repository of practice sheets and linguistic primers for learners at all levels.

This site takes popular movies and uses their summaries and idioms to discuss the English language. Great for ELL students with a love of U.S. culture.

These inventive lesson plans teach ELL by drawing inspiration from recent news and global affairs. Packed with information about word usage, grammar, and more.

A handy reference guide to major parts of speech and their usage, with bonus material for ELL instructors.

This wonderful site not only offers a variety of lessons and exercises, it also boasts links to other helpful ELL programs, books, and schools.

Forvo can best be described as an audio wiki for word pronunciations. One of the problems with learning to speak a language that is not phonetic is trying to figure out how to pronounce the words. Forvo hosts hundreds of recordings of word pronunciations by native speakers. Currently there are nearly 200 languages supported on Forvo. Along with word pronunciations, Forvo provides some basic demographic information about each language. Forvo's content is user supported and user generated so new pronunciations are added every day.

CAPL, Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, is a project developed by Dr. Michael Shaughnessy at Washington & Jefferson College. The purpose of CAPL is to provide images that demonstrate the true meaning and intention of the words in a language. CAPL currently has collections of images for teaching and learning English (North American), German, French, Chinese, and Spanish. CAPL also has images for Japanese, Russian, and Ukranian. All of the images in the collection are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for re-use and manipulation for non-commercial purposes. CAPL is no longer active, but can be accessed via the Wayback Machine.

ESL Basics is a site that provides short video vocabulary lessons for beginning and advanced ELL students. For teachers, ESL Basics has a small collection of suggestions and ideas for teaching ESOL. ESL Basics is adding new content on a regular basis.

Are you having trouble finding keywords to use in your database searches? Try this handy thesaurus tool to help you come up with alternative words and phrases.