Wikibooks — Foreign Language Resources

Wikibooks is a collaborative, open content project. Authors around the world participate in creating books in many different languages and genres. For example,  there are thousands of pages written in English, French, Italian etc.

and hundreds of pages in languages such as Arabic,  Farsi, Norsk, Simple English, Tagalog and Turkish.

While there are several other sub projects of note (Wikijunior — books for children, Simple English — materials on various topics) because of the uneven level of coverage at this point, the Wikibooks is most useful for the foreign language resources.  

 

Digital Libraries for Schools — ICDL

The International Children’s Digital Library is a wonderful collection of over 2600+ digital books (ebooks) in almost 50 languages including Arabic, French, Spanish, English, Farsi and Mongolian.  The mission of the ICDL “is to support the world’s children in becoming effective members of the global community – who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas — by making the best in children’s literature available online free of charge.”

Through an advanced search, the continuously growin collection may be located by various attributes such as language, audience, subject, genre or appearance (e.g. “cover colors”). Some of the books, such as “Black Ear… Blonde Ear” are bilingual

Arabic/English Bilingual

An interesting and very useful feature is the ability to switch the language of the interface so that the library may be searched in a user’s primary language. Books are easily browsable for reading and it is possible to print pages as well. Students really like to use this resource and their feedback and ideas are solicited and welcomed 🙂 Teachers like it too because new and different foreign language materials are often hard to locate. In addition, there is a helpful “Teachers’ Manual.”