Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction is a free gallery of images hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Research Library. The gallery contains nearly 500 drawings of people conversing, scenes in houses and buildings, and objects commonly found in houses. You'll also find drawings scenes in cities, in stores, and in nature. The visuals are all drawn cartoon style without any text or speech bubbles.
Applications for Education
If you're looking for some visual prompts to use in your language lessons, take a look at the gallery at Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction. You can search the gallery by keyword or simple browse through the collection.
Has several links to flash game sites where you can arrange furniture. Have used 1 for listening activity on the housing topic. I used Japanese to say where things were in the room and students had to place the items in the correct spot.
Lets you place furniture wherever you like in a room (flash). I used this as a listening activity for the topic houses & saying where things are (on, under, etc). Also students did it as a pairwork exercise.
stories, rhymes and interactive activities based around the topics of 'Houses and homes' 'Bugs, birds and beasts' and 'Whatever the weather'. Each topic also has a word bank with printable picture flashcards. The site is available for French, German, Spa
"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn.
About Deb Roy
Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs"
This is an "0.1" version because electronic texts are far easier to amend than printed books, and so they must be. And this version will need to be: on the one hand, scanning and OCRing (see Formal Features below) is a stupendous possibility, but it is not totally reliable, and even if I proof-read the electronic text, I probably left many mistakes. On the other hand, I hope to be able in future to reinsert some of the texts under copyright for which I haven't obtained yet a renewal of the permissions given for the print edition (see Copyright and Content below). However, the deadline of the Google Book Search Settlement for asking Google to pull out their own, inacceptable, electronic version made it imperative to publish this one quickly.
This electronic version of "Theatre of Sleep - Dreams in Literature " is multilingual, because it uses the original texts when they were in the public domain and the translation was copyrighted.
It was made by scanning and OCRing the book, which left many mistakes even if I proofread the result of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition). I am correcting them in the Diigo comments, and would be very grateful to others who would do the same.