Using Lingro.com

Here's a tool for building comprehension of nonfiction articles or any text on the web and developing a strong vocabulary in English, Spanish, French, or pretty much any target language. This resource could be useful for nonfiction reading and analysis units, and could especially be helpful for ELL students and FLEP students who need frequent word-rich encounters when reading, summarizing, and preparing to discuss nonfiction articles.

I've taken screenshots of two views, but to see for yourself, go to Lingro.com and set up a free account. You'll see a place to paste in the web address of any news article or text that you've found online. Select a dictionary -- in this case, English (there are many choices). Then click the arrow to bring that article into Lingro's "framework" and read. When you see words that you are curious or clueless about, click on it and its definition will pop up. Nothing really new so far. But if you'd like to keep that word in a wordlist, click on "Add to my word list" and continue reading and building that list. These word lists are saved in your account for future reference, along with the entire sentence from the article. These words are now available as flashcards, and the sentences that are set aside give a context for learning that word.

Here's an example of two views that you will see. (Along with logging into Lingro.com, I decided to use this article here: http://www.suntimes.com/news/12381336-418/cia-thwarts-undetectable-al-qaida-bomb-plot.html from a Google News search. Hardly a lovely topic, but the article was in the news and I was curious.)

The words can be viewed as flashcards, too.

These words and sentences could then be incorporated into Quizlet or Quia for review by students, or into a portfolio of articles that students will collect.