Online reading resources for young ESL learning?

October 5, 2007 12:43 PM

What online tools could best simulate reading aloud to a young ESL student?

At my volunteer gig, I was approached by a Spanish-speaking mom who was worried about her accent and pronunciation in reading English-language books to her six-year-old daughter. She knew how important it was, and for sure will keep reading aloud in both English and Spanish (to practice her own English, too), but was looking for help from the interwebs.

Can you suggest any sites or resources that can simulate the experience (seeing and hearing the words together with pictures)? Storyline Online seems like it would be a good start, for example, but I can never seem to get the site to load.

posted by lauranesson to education (4 answers total)

Not online, but I used to have a bunch of picture books that came with cassettes of the book being read aloud. The library might have these. Also, many libraries have story hours or something similar.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 3:25 PM on October 5, 2007

There are online read-aloud tools that are used in education for students with print and learning disabilities. Teachers often use these read-aloud tools to help all students in an inclusion classroom participate and this often means using these tools with ESL students.

Basically you download these tools (a lot of them are free) and they highlight a word and read it aloud to you. You can place text into the programs to be read to you, copy it from anything on your computer, or use it to read websites, e-books, or any digital text. Obviously the computer reads the text so the problem is that it's a computer voice and the pronunciation isn't exactly human. I'm not sure if this is the kind of program you're looking for but they're worth checking out- I think they could help you/this mother out:

Word Talk - Free

Natural Reader- Free and really easy to download/use

There are more free ones that are harder to download and
there are a lot more that cost money but I think for this you'd want the free/accessible ones.

Hope this helps
posted by bobdylanforever at 8:29 AM on October 7, 2007

Oops- doesn't look like I linked those correctly- this should work

Word Talk
Natural Reader
posted by bobdylanforever at 8:32 AM on October 7, 2007

I missed this post the first time around, but wanted to suggest Starfall.com.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:47 PM on December 9, 2007