I’ve recently started following @singalingo on Twitter and been interested in several links that she has tweeted. This morning she posted the following-
When I checked it out,I was initially disappointed as I thought it was just a catalogue of books with information about where you might buy them. However, when I clicked on one, I discovered that the books are actually scanned onto the site and you can read them online.
Not only that, but you can read them in a number of languages. And as you can see from the title screenshot, you can search by word, age group, type of story, theme, character etc.
For example – the following book The Blue Sky is originally in
English but is available in a number of languages. The information on the book is written in Spanish and it has been contributed by a University in Croatia.
If you click on the book, each page is presented to you – the writing is a little small but on the English books, you can enlarge the text (not sure why it’s only one language that does this!)
By clicking on the top you can choose the language of the book – so you can read the story in English to make sure you know what it’s about and then read in another language with understanding already in place, allowing you to focus on vocabulary and structures.
Most of the books I’ve browsed have several sentences per page so might need some
simplification, but with ‘pupils accessing authentic texts’ one of the Framework objectives, these are a great resource.
And why not use the fact that many of the books are available in a variety of languages to compare and contrast languages. Are there similar words on the pages? Can you ‘recognise’ any words? How would you recognise a verb? A noun? This book features a dog that is called Schnitzel in Italian and English, Pompom in French and Popi in Spanish. why might that be?
I love getting something for nothing! And I do so love books!
and then again (after prompting for a URL!) at 2 o’clock by which time I’d had another 30 hits!
