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"In the increasingly interconnected world of the 21st century, Americans must be able to communicate effectively in English and other world languages. Yet while countries around the world are implementing language programs that position their students to become multilingual world citizens, results of a recent national report by the Center for Applied Linguistics (Rhodes & Pufahl, 2010) reveal that opportunities for U.S. students to learn a foreign language have declined.

Welcome to the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, CAPL, the source for authentic images for language learning. As a language teacher and learner, I always seek to connect language, culture, and meaning. This site represents my interest to not only write about language learning, but provide concrete examples. Our world rich in diversity, both linguistic and visual, and often the connection between word and image can be lost. As commercial globalization brings the world together through 'common products', we sometimes forget how our visual perception of the world affects our use of words and the meanings they convey. Is a house really a Haus, is pain really хлеб, and when we see red cabbage, is it really red? These are simple and mundane questions that underscore the fact that visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture. The CAPL project seeks to explore this idea through a collection of authentic photographs arranged by language and context. In the coming year, we will add more photos, more databases, and more textual descriptions. Check back often as we expand our collection. It is our hope that the collection itself can spur research in a variety of areas and that the collection can be used by language teachers and learners throughout the world with its generous Creative Commons license.

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning. We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world's leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

NMC Virtual Worlds is an NMC program designed to help educational and other learning-focused organizations explore the potential of virtual spaces in a manner that builds on community knowledge, is cost-effective, and ensures high quality. Since its launch in January 2007, NMC Virtual Worlds has been known for its attention to detail and to client needs. NMC provides a palette of premium custom services for education and training that includes developing facilities to hold company meetings and events, holding trainings and seminars, creating simulations for educators to recreate historical, scientific, and literary settings, organizing and managing conferences and mixed media events, and growing successful learning communities.

Interesting data visualization showing the number of speakers for wide range of world languages

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. The principal objectives of the WDL are to: * Promote international and intercultural understanding; * Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet; * Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences; * Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL, pronounced "able") is a membership organization for the world e-portfolio community that now has established affiliations and collaborations with nearly all world-wide portfolio initiatives, projects and organizations. Members and affiliates help continue the work of educational transformation by focusing on new designs in learning and assessment, on increasing connections among the portfolio community, and on moving toward a more authentic assessment of actual student achievement and progress based on evidence of learning over time.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs founded the International MANGA Award in 2007 for the purpose of expanding international exchange and mutual understanding through the MANGA culture which is widely accepted around the world. This award honors the MANGA artists who are contributing to the development of MANGA culture in the world "

"For the third year, AAEEBL members and eportfolio practitioners from around the world will gather at the Seaport World Trade Center on stunning Boston Harbor for the AAEEBL Annual Conference. Once again, AAEEBL is co-locating with Campus Technology, and attendees will be welcome to attend either AAEEBL or CT sessions."

"Simulate real relief efforts in Food Force: A major crisis has developed in the Indian Ocean and the United Nations is sending you on a mission to help feed the millions of people who are going without food! Designed by the United Nations, the premise of the game is to try and stop world hunger by strategic planning (though luck seems to be a bigger contributer to success than skill at times...)" Game is designed for native speakers (not language learners) but could be incorporated at upper levels into unit on food/hunger. Free downloadable software for Windows.

Lists current local times around the world and has function to enter a particular time and convert it to a different time zone.

Outreach World, a comprehensive one-stop resource for teaching international and area studies and foreign languages in the precollegiate classroom.

Stanford Humanities Fellow Edith Sheffer had an idea of how she could personalize history for her students. This led to an innovative use of the wiki. The following are highlights from a conversation in January 2009 about her course "Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990.″. The idea was to have a writing assignment that would function like weekly response papers but be slightly more interesting to the students. Each student would create his or her own character that was born in 1900 and be in complete control of their persona. Beyond the initial introductory sentence that gave their parent's occupation, and birthplace and gender, they could make life choices.

AACE World Conferences: ED-MEDIA, E-Learn, and SITE.

The Modern Language Association supports a broad, intellectually driven approach to teaching language and culture in higher education. To study the best ways of implementing this approach in today's world, the MLA Executive Council established an Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. The committee was charged with examining the current language crisis that has occurred as a result of 9/11 and with considering the effects of this crisis on the teaching of foreign languages in colleges and universities. This summary of the committee's and the Executive Council's deliberations offers background and context for the association's recommendations regarding the challenges and opportunities facing language study in higher education. While the recommendations address issues specific to the United States, they may be applicable to other contexts and countries.

WORLD CALL LANGUAGE LINKS LIBRARY - Free/Open Source Language Education Resource Repository

Connecting you with the world's diverse cultures is this KML layer produced by The Rosetta Project / The Long Now Foundation. Around the world, a significant part of cultural diversity is experienced through language. It is feared that many of the languages, and therefore the cultures they belong to are being lost at such a rapid rate that "linguists predict that we may lose as much as 90% of the world's linguistic diversity within the next century." This KML provides an opportunity to explore the areas where these endangered languages are spoken throughout Africa and the Americas.

Welcome to the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant. The archive in its current form is a self-standing website. Eventually all the data here will be incorporated into the comprehensive UCLA Digital Library where it will be maintained as a permanent resource for future generations.

Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you. You can also help others recording your pronunciations in your own language.

Duolingo is a free service that helps you learn languages with your friends while simultaneously contributing to translate real-world content from the Web.