Teaching Materials

Selection of Languages

The LMP covers 151 less commonly taught languages from all over the globe, taking into consideration political and geographical significance as well as practical concerns such as availability of current materials. We currently cover many of the languages of the Middle East and Central Asia as they are of importance in today's world. We also include at least one language from every continent (except Antarctica!). We cover languages in need of revitalization, as is the case with many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, as well as languages that are thriving and gaining strength in this country like Mandarin and Japanese. We gear our offerings toward an American audience, so French, Spanish, and German are not included in our database as they are among the most commonly taught languages in the US. The database includes only living languages, so languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Biblical Hebrew are not covered.

Many languages have more than one name in English. Most LMP language names conform to the MARC standards, which are based on Library of Congress Subject Headings. Click here for a list of the LMP language names that do not conform to the MARC standards. Many languages are also commonly known by other names. To find alternate names, we recommend you consult the SIL Ethnologue database or the MARC Code List for Languages.

Selection of Materials

The LMP gears its materials towards an American audience of language teachers and learners. To that end, we strive to include materials which will be useful either directly in the classroom or as tools for the instructors to help them create their own materials and presentations.

Most of our materials are geared towards the teaching and learning of specific languages. We do also include materials dealing with general language pedagogy, especially those that focus on the teaching of Less Commonly Taught Languages. These can be found by selecting the ‘Language’ search tool and choosing ‘General Pedagogy’ on the top of the list. We include in this category materials which offer practical guidance to language instructors, rather than theoretical works on language acquisition.

We generally include materials which have been published after 1950 and contain some English. We choose to include materials published after 1950 because we want to make sure our materials reflect as much as possible the modern language as spoken today. We choose to include materials with English so they will be useful to students with little or no knowledge of other languages. In cases where we cannot find many materials for a certain language, we will include older materials. We also include for the same reason materials written in a language other than English where that language is a minority language in another country, for example Yakut in Russia, Uighur in China, and Quechua in South America. In those and similar cases we have included some materials written in Russian, Mandarin, and Spanish.

We also try to include materials that are available to the American public. This is not always possible, and we apologize if any of the materials on our database have gone out of print after we have included it. Our citations give the publisher's address whenever we can find it so you can contact the publisher yourself to ask about acquiring a specific book. Even if a book is out of print publishers may have copies in a warehouse. Many of the books on the LMP are on the Interlibrary Loan system. Most university libraries, and even public libraries, are on the Interlibrary Loan network, and your local library can request a copy of a book they do not own from another library, free of charge. You can also check internet retailers, which sometimes offer used copies of out of print books.

Organization of Materials

The LMP organizes its materials into several categories. You can search for materials quite simply just by language. For a more detailed search, we have arranged our materials by 'material type', 'level', and 'audience'.

Under 'material', you can search for textbooks, grammars, dictionaries, readers, phrasebooks, etc. We include workbooks, teacher's manuals, games, flashcards, and more under the category 'supplementary materials'. We include, for instance, published bibliographies and language surveys under 'reference'.

Under 'level' you can search for materials geared towards the proficiency of the learner. We generally follow the publisher's recommended level for each material.

Under 'audience' you can search for materials intended for primary, secondary, post-secondary, and heritage learners. For this category, as well, we generally adhere to the publisher's recommended audience. Primary materials include children's picture dictionaries and children's bilingual storybooks, as well as traditional teaching materials. Heritage materials are those meant for learners who grew up speaking a language other than English at home, but who have had little or no formal education in that language.

Can't Find What You're Looking For?

Because the LMP covers less commonly taught languages, often there is a lack of materials for a particular language. If you can't find the exact material you are looking for, be creative and widen your search to include materials you can adapt for a different audience. Adult and college-level learners often enjoy children's picture dictionaries, and the material for students at the beginning level will usually not be too easy for them. Readers for more advanced learners can be glossed for use with an intermediate class. Exercises in a beginning textbook can be changed with new vocabulary to suit a more advanced class.

Records

Please click on the name of a language below to see an automatically-generated summary of the categories of materials currently in the LMP database for that language.

_General Pedagogy	Burmese	Kashmiri	Russian
Afrikaans	Cantonese	Kazakh	Samoan
Albanian	Catalan	Khmer	Serbian
Amharic	Cebuano	Korean	Serbian/Croatian
Arabic	Chechen	Kurdish	Shona
Arabic, Algerian	Cherokee	Kyrgyz	Sindhi
Arabic, Chadian	Chewa	Lakota	Sinhalese
Arabic, Egyptian	Cree	Lao	Slovak
Arabic, Emirate	Croatian	Latvian	Slovenian
Arabic, Iraqi	Czech	Lingala	Somali
Arabic, Jordanian	Danish	Lithuanian	Sotho
Arabic, Kuwaiti	Dari	Luo	Swahili
Arabic, Lebanese	Dutch	Macedonian	Swedish
Arabic, Libyan	Estonian	Maithili	Tagalog
Arabic, Mauritanian	Ewe	Malagasy	Tajik
Arabic, Modern Standard	Finnish	Malay	Tamil
Arabic, Moroccan	Fula	Malayalam	Tatar
Arabic, Palestinian	Georgian	Maltese	Telugu
Arabic, Saudi	Greek, Modern	Mandarin	Thai
Arabic, Sudanese	Guarani	Maori	Tibetan
Arabic, Syrian	Gujarati	Marathi	Tigrinya
Arabic, Tunisian	Haitian Creole	Mende	Tswana
Arabic, Yemeni	Hausa	Mongolian	Turkish
Armenian	Hawaiian	Nahuatl	Turkmen
Assamese	Hebrew	Navajo	Twi
Aymara	Hindi	Nepali	Uighur
Azerbaijani	Hmong	Norwegian	Ukrainian
Baluchi	Hungarian	Nyanja	Urdu
Bambara	Icelandic	Ojibwe	Uzbek
Bashkir	Igbo	Oriya	Vietnamese
Basque	Ilocano	Oromo	Warlpiri
Belarusian	Indonesian	Pashto	Welsh
Bengali	Inuit	Persian	Wolof
Berber	Irish	Polish	Xhosa
Bhojpuri	Italian	Portuguese	Yakut
Bosnian	Japanese	Punjabi	Yiddish
Brahui	Javanese	Quechua	Yoruba
Bulgarian	Kannada	Romanian	Zulu
Buriat