What’s Storyplace?

Storyplace is an interactive website designed to provide children a virtual library. The site is split into two parts: the Pre-School Library, and the Kindergarten Library.

Storyplace is designed for children who speak English as their first language, or speak a different language at home, but live in an English-speaking country. However, it is useful for students in non-English speaking countries as well.

The Storyplace website was created by The Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County and is supported, in part, by book purchases generated through the site.

The ability to show animations synchronised to sound and text has a lot of potential for creating interactive ESL reading resources for young children under 8.

There are even some advantages over reading together with a parent (but please don’t stop reading with your child):

• The child can control the pace of the story.
• The child can choose to review parts that catch his or her imagination.
• The animations are timed to match the words giving children more clues as to the meaning of the words.
• In an ESL setting, the interactive resources provide audio spoken by a native speaker.

Learning how to produce sounds in a second language is challenging with sounds that aren’t in your first language.

When teaching, I get uncomfortable when a student asks for help with pronunciation. My usual solution is to make certain the student can identify difficult sounds before trying to pronounce them. Once the student learns to identify the sounds, I find it difficult to teach the student how to produce the sounds.

How does this help you lɜrn ɪŋglɪʃ?

The letters at the end of the above sentence (they read “learn English” by the way) are from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. The IPA is an alphabet that has a letter to represent every sound in every human language.

While it might take some time, learning the IPA gives you the ability to check the pronunciation of different words in the dictionary. This is a very valuable learning tool, particularly for people living in non-English-speaking countries.

Reading English is a challenge because most letters can make several sounds. There are many different ways of pronouncing each letter, many rules for governing pronunciation, and many exceptions to the rules of English.

The reasons for these challenges lie in the history of English. No language is completely isolated from the influence of other languages, but English has a large number of languages playing important roles in its development. As a result, reading English is one of the great challenges to learning English.

The road is often used in English to mean a journey. The journey doesn’t have to be a physical one either.

My previous post, titled Beginnings, has several examples of the road being used as a metaphor for learning. Learning is a lot like a journey because they both have a start, an end, and can take a long time. In that post I use road both generally to represent any task that has a beginning, and specifically to represent the task of writing a blog.