Links to Sources of Authentic Materials for Teaching African Languages

Searching the Internet for African Language Materials, http://www.google.com (click on Language Tools -- can search and find pictures in specific languages from specific national/regional resources; )

A Search Index to Africa and Africana (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/guide.html)

List of African Language Resources on the Web (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/lang.html)

Specific Language Learning Sites

Kiswahili (http://www.cis.yale.edu/swahili/)

Wolof (http://www.wolofonline.com/)

Hausa (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/aflang/hausa/hausa.html and http://www.hausavoices.com/)

News Services in African Languages

Deutsche Welle -- A German International News Service that produces broadcasts in Arabic, Hausa, Kiswahili (http://www.dw-world.de/select/0,,,00.html)

BBC, World Service -- Africa with versions in regional languages (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm)

Newspapers

Arabic Language Newspaper from Saudi Arabia (http://www.asharqalawsat.com/)

English Language Newspaper from Kenya (http://www.nationaudio.com/News/DailyNation/Today/)

What to do with authentic materials, a long list of suggestions and exercise types.

Electronic Communications

Email.
Exchanges ePALS: Classroom Exchange
K-12 classes can locate schools in Africa which are interested in communicating by e-mail, IRC Chat, in English, French, Swahili, Afrikaans, and other languages. Based in Easton, Connecticut. http://www.epals.com/

Description of Email-based dialog journals in Spanish and a collaborative email project for teaching English to Chinese speakers

Chat. For Latin-letter based alphabets, you can use functions within KU's Blackboard, KU's campus wide chat (http://www.ku.edu/acs/internet-chat.shtml), start a group on MSN or Yahoo (will allow you to do chat as well -- Yahoo has unicode support)

Web-based Discussion board See a sample discussion that was set up for third-year Russian course.(Script to do this on your own website is available from: http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html)

Cultural Discussion Combination of web-based surveys plus discussion boards

The Cultura Project (http://web.mit.edu/french/culturaNEH/) -- a cross-cultural discussion between American and French Students in which certain cultural information was first collected and then it was discussed by both sides in their native languages using a web-bulletin board.

This page was written by William J. Comer,
Updated on March 12, 2003