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As part of the Library of Congress American Memory series, the CAL Collection of American English Dialect Recordings has been digitized and is now accessible online. This collection of interviews and other speech recordings, primarily from dialect research and oral history projects, provides a centralized source of North American dialect samples, preserving valuable linguistic resources that might otherwise be lost. The collection was donated by CAL to the Library of Congress in 1986 and has been accessible only by personal visit to the Library since then.

Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas

It all started over a decade ago when a group of American and British ESL teachers at the Marzio School in the south of France noticed that the traditional materials they were using from The Big Publishers to teach their students simply weren't doing the job they were supposedly designed for. Classroom English is all too often "perfect" with slow short phrases spoken on the audio and video materials used with students. This is fine until the learners actually meet genuine Americans, British people, and other Anglo-Saxons, to discover that nobody, in the real world, speaks "classroom English". The idea was to take the shock out of hearing real English for the first time. Since our students now watch and listen to real people, the shock is built into the method itself, saving learners many hours of frustration during their first weeks and months in new English-speaking environments.

Online exhibitions from the museum of the american indian (smithsonian collections)

Links to online exhibitions from the museum of the american indian (smithsonian collections)

corpus of American English

Amazing life, an entrepeaneur, a real one, from Brooklyn.

An interactive chart that you can use to show how any word is pronounced by clicking the individual symbols. You can select between the British and American vowls.

From Richard Byrne Free Technology for teacher, quoted below:Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community. Applications for Education Listen and Read looks to be a great resource for social studies lessons and reading practice in general. At the end of each book there is a short review of the new words that students were introduced to in the book. Students can hear these words pronounced as many times as they like. Listen and Read books worked on my computer and on my Android tablet. Scholastic implies that the books also work on iPads and IWBs"

Stories from an American Life

ATI's TEFL Thailand or TESOL Thailand is a 120 hours comprehensive TEFL training program that includes TEFL training, teaching observation and teaching practice. This course is perfect for aspiring and professional ESL teachers.

American TESOL Institute's 120 hours TEFL Certification course is popular in Thailand. This course is the minimum requirement to get English teaching jobs in Thailand or anywhere else in the world. This course is ideal for both native and non-native English speakers and is the way to get top ESL jobs in the world. In order to enrol for this course, you need to have a firm grasp over the English language and a passion for teaching. You do not need to be a college graduate or an experienced teacher to become eligible for the course

Excellent resource for finding samples; go to beemp3.com to search for free copies (University libraries have some of them)

Excellent resource for finding samples; go to beemp3.com to search for free copies (University libraries have some of them)

Very interesting series -there are also posts on other languages from previous months

Webinars acerca del uso de varias herramientas (twitter, qrcodes, facebook, digital storytelling, mobile learning, comics, blogs, etc.)

Accent reduction software for Windows