Salem State College | Department of Foreign Languages | Language Resource Center

Pen Pals

Introduction

You may not be able to travel and communicate with people speaking the language you're learning face-to-face, as you would like, or as would be ideal. But thanks to now ubiquitous e-mail and chatrooms, there is no reason why you couldn't make acquaintances and even friendships with people all over the world. With email you can engage in asynchronous communication, the classical penpal situation, although now you don't have to wait weeks to get a reply, but perhaps only minutes.

The main issue is how to find someone out there whom you've never met that you might be interested in communicating with. Ideally, language instructors should probably serve as intermediaries in this endeavor, though students themselves may do their own searching.

There are a few websites and listservs dedicated to making all this easier, and safer.

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E-mail pen-pals

Here are some links to pen pal sites. None of them is necessarily endorsed here. Use your own judgment.

Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections (IECC)
"IECC (Intercultural E-Mail Classroom Connections) is a free service to help teachers link with partners in other countries and cultures for e-mail classroom pen-pal and project exchanges. Since its creation in 1992, IECC has distributed over 28,000 requests for e-mail partnerships. At last count, more than 7650 teachers in 82 countries were participating in one or more of the IECC lists."

International E-Mail Tandem Network
Language learning in tandem via the Internet: Find e-mail pals for other languages.

Find a Foreign Pen-Pal (or Web-Pal) (free)

Keypals International
For K-12 students.

Key Pals and Correspondents Exchange
List of penpal projects for school age children. At the Education Place (eduplace) site of Houghton Mifflin.

E-pals Classroom Exchange
"ePALS Classroom Exchange set out to provide students and teachers with an opportunity to freely meet and correspond with other classrooms from around the World."

E-Mail Keypals for Language Fluency
Short article on pen pal issues. Excellent links. "This article appeared originally in Foreign Language Notes (Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey), Vol 38, No. 3, pp 8-10, Fall 1996. I have since updated some of the links and other information."

Keypal Opportunities for Students

Englishtown: Penpals for classes

The "Café électronique" of the Quartier français du village planétaire contains extensive resources for locating French "corres".

International Writing Exchange

The Problem of Non-Response
"Non-response of pen-pals seems to be a real problem. This thread of a discussion on the IECC list discusses the issues and how to deal with them."

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Salem State College | Department of Foreign Languages | Language Resource Center

Page URL: www.lrc.salemstate.edu/penpals.htm

Last updated: July 31, 2000