AVÊÓƵ

Facilities for language learning

Find out about our facilities and learning spaces available for students studying modern language and English language courses.

Facilities and resources

The Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre is an open-access area which has facilities for autonomous study. You will have access to:

• study materials for many world languages
• a large library of feature films and documentaries
• PC workstations with access to digital audio and video
• a group viewing study area
• digital language laboratory for class work.

If you're looking for informal language practice, we have a Language Exchange noticeboard. We have also worked with the Students' Union to establish a regular , bringing together Sussex students who are learning foreign languages with international students who are studying English.

We are adding new stock to the main Library catalogue, so you can also .

We are proud to be members of the  (AULC) and the  (CercleS).

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Online resources

If you're considering studying languages at Sussex, see the following language resources to get an idea of the support available to you.

Modern languages

• Chinese language learning resources
  •  - the University Library subscribes to the full, unabridged bilingual Oxford dictionaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  •  - 22 lessons in simplified characters at elementary-intermediate level, suitable for students who have already learned Chinese for at least 3 months. Good use of video files with transcripts, interactive character writing exercises, interactive grammar drills, multiple choice vocabulary tests, and indexes for grammar and vocabulary. From the , University of Oxford.
  • Amongst much other material, they also have some colourful pages on  and 7 lessons of  with audio and transcripts, plus sound files for the Practical Chinese Reader book.
  •  has some useful materials for self-study, including situational dialogues and .
  •  Chinese-English dictionary.
  •  is a free Chinese<->English online dictionary with some excellent learning tools: audio pronunciation not just of characters but whole phrases, and handwriting recognition so you can search by stroke. Sign up to create vocab lists, to test yourself, and to use the Q&A forum.
  •  allows you to view any Chinese website with popups that give the pinyin reading and English definition of each word. Alternatively, you can enter a text - either way, words can be added to your own study list. Impressive.
  •  - Dr. Tianwei Xie has collected links to a great many websites for learning online, plus some lessons of his own. Probably the best place to start.
  •  - see stroke order animated, alongside the pinyin, audio pronunciation and English definition. Can be viewed alphabetically rather than in the University of Southern California's proprietary lesson order.
  •  - online tools to learn Chinese, including a Mandarin course, annotation tools, dictionaries, songs, poems, proverbs and converters for pinyin, unicode, traditional and simplified Chinese.
  •  is an online flashcard program which randomly generates multiple-choice questions, by showing one hanzi and letting you guess the correct pinyin out of 5 randomly selected from the deck. Or you can see the English and guess the hanzi; any combination of categories is possible. You can even download the program to your own computer and edit the vocabulary.
  •  - daily audio lessons on Mandarin. Look in the archive for hundreds of previous lessons, searchable by level and keyword. There are transcripts and other backup materials too, but many have to be paid for.  is a similar project.
  •  from Erik Peterson include a dictionary, a useful program to add pinyin to a file on your computer and one to display graphical characters from encoded text which you input. There's more for Java-capable browsers, such as flashcards and a romanisation converter.
  •  - basic phrases to complement the TV series (available in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre here at Sussex).
  •  from the Online Confucius Institute.
  •  by Haiwang Yuan of Western Kentucky University - essential phrases (with audio) for shopping, dining, travelling and greetings.
  •  is an etymological Chinese-English dictionary showing the genealogy of around 12,000 words using 4,000 characters.
  •  - lots of printer-friendly reference sheets, tests and revision aids, aimed to help you speak, read and write Hong Kong Chinese (pronunciation given is Cantonese 'jyutping' instead of Mandarin 'pinyin' but plenty of the content is useful for both).
  • Carlos McEvilly maintains a  page.

  News and journals on-line

  •  - the Chinese government newspaper plus several related publications.
  •  is a prominent Hong Kong newspaper.
  •  offers headline news and the Sing Tao Daily in various formats, including graphical (no fonts needed).
  • .
  •  has news stories and audio in Mandarin and Cantonese.
  •  - links to sources of political, social and economic news about mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet available free of charge on the internet.
  • Usenet newsgroups:  and .

  Sources for further research

  •  - BBC Scotland series featuring video diaries of different Chinese families, providing a useful insight into Chinese family life (for example, ).
  •  currently offers several video clips on Chinese culture, and plans to expand to provide live online video.
  •  - a wealth of annotated links on Chinese studies, including culture, e-texts, web radio and other audio programs, language software, language resources for the language learner, conferences, associations, etc.
  •  (BCLTS) is an organization of Chinese Language Teachers in the universities and other language teaching institutions in the UK. It is affiliated with the  at the University of Oxford and is also a sub-group of the .
  •  (BICC) is a joint venture between Oxford, Bristol, and Manchester Universities. It has been awarded a grant of £5m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council with the aim of making it Britain's leading centre for research and teaching on China and Chinese language.
• English language resources
  •  (Using English for Academic Purposes) is a guide for international students developed by Andy Gillett of the University of Hertfordshire.
  •  from London Metropolitan University: 36 activities (in 4 units) especially designed to help with the business aspect of Academic English. See also their  multimedia learning objects.
  •  - a short orientation and listening course for international students.
  •  online with the British Council - lots of good learning activities.  - academic writing materials, based on assessed student writing from British universities.  - practise your English through football!
  •  - more than 12,000 of them, and over 1,000  - a vast collection of quizzes, tests, exercises and puzzles.
  •  - how to learn English effectively. Includes advice from people who learned English successfully. Site written in simple English.
  •  is a free English language course for beginners, pre-intermediate or intermediate students, themed around a spaceship voyage. There's messaging, homepages and collaborative storylines as well as puzzles, games, exercises and projects to help you practise your English skills.
  •  - a fun study site with word games, puzzles, quizzes, slang, proverbs etc.
  •  offers lots of discussion forums, quizzes, idioms and the , a message board where your English questions are answered by a team of teachers from around the world.
  •  - animated online games to help you improve your English. Requires Flash.
  •  - English for Spanish speakers: courses, grammar, vocabulary, exercises, books, downloadable software etc.

  Reference

  • The  is now free online with audio clips for pronunciation, alongside a thesaurus.  and several  are also free to search online, as are Collins'  and . 
  • For advanced vocabulary, try Michael Quinion's  or .
  •  of American English includes audio pronunciation. There's also a full  which allows you to click on any words in the definition.
  •  is interesting and potentially useful: type a word and see it used in context in a YouTube video!
  •  of English words and phrases.
    
    

    News and media

    • Most British newspapers have online editions: ,  and  for example have almost the whole newspaper freely available.  requires payment for some content though.
    •  and  are also well-presented, in-depth news sites.
    •  allows you to search and browse over 25,000 continuously updated news sources.
      
      
    •  is intended as a reflection of the cultural and commercial life of Brighton, Hove and the South Coast, and includes a section for .

    Listening

    •  - audio, exercises, glossaries and other material based on the World Service broadcasts.
    •  helps to improve your listening skills using dictation from audio and video on the web. It repeats sections until you enter the correct transcription, and is particulary useful for detailed listening that involves bottom-up processing skills.
    •  - English Listening Lesson Library Online is an impressive library of hundreds of audio clips of English speakers from around the world, many as audio slideshows (with pictures) complete with subtitles/audio transcripts and audio notes about the clips (and even transcripts of those!). There are also comprehension questions, some of which are also audio.
    •  - learn (mostly American) English through videos of people speaking "real English": spontaneous, authentic speech instead of "classroom English".
    •  - a virtual exhibition from the British Library (log in with your university username for full access). The  website covers more contemporary regional vocabulary.
    •  - pronunciation guides to seven world varieties of English, with native speaker sounds and accents.
    •  run a useful site based on CNN and CBS stories: full/abridged/outline text of the story, listen to the text, video clip, with a variety of exercises.
    •  - well-written and structured listening quizzes for autonomous learners, including some Divace-specific material and some video.
    •  provides audio fragments - regularly updated from a variety of sources - which you can listen to while reading the spoken text on-screen. You can look up the meaning of words by clicking on them and check your understanding by answering questions.
      
      
    •  is an advanced-level self-study course and community, from the makers of Flo-Joe.

    Exams and Tests

    • Short cuts to , ,  and the general US graduate entrance exams,  and .
    •  - Flash-based testing from Edufind, including an .
    •  has a good set of links to online IELTS practice and assessment materials.
    •  claims to be "your best IELTS study partner" and they have some useful sample band 7 scripts. Another  site has an alternative selection.
    •  is a well-respected website for Cambridge exam preparation, but now charges for subscriptions.

    Reading and Writing

    •  offers on-line writing support (tutors reply to your e-mail), plus a virtual sheaf of handouts on writing skills, grammar, punctuation etc. They also maintain a comprehensive list of other on-line writing centres and resources, such as  at Missouri University.
    •  at the University of Pennsylvania is a good starting point for browsing the treasure trove of online literature.
    •  is a  project to allow realistic access to unique old books such as the original Alice.
    •  is a free online ESL reader for low intermediate level and above. The novel tells the story of a Vietnam War conscientious objector's adventures in about 20,000 words, and includes comprehension and discussion/essay questions, with the author's reading of the answers. It can also be heard online read by the author.

    Variants

    • , a  and .
    •  is a guide to speaking British for Americans, or look up words in these .
    •  is a blog on the differences between British and American English (by the head of Linguistics here at Sussex).
• French language learning resources
  •  from the Institut français in London offers French cultural content online such as ebooks, films and audio, including some learning resources.
  •  includes details of current French events and films in our capital, alongside articles on a range of subjects.
  •  - French version of the ubiquitous search engine.

  News & media on-line

  •  (Institut National Audiovisuel Français) - an archive of televised news and special reports from national French channels.
  •  - the full edition online (though a charge is made for in-depth stories).
  •  offers a partial online service - each day's front page is available in  format, plus several top stories in full and the occasional special.
  •  allows you to search and browse hundreds of continuously updated news sources.
  •  and  have rich websites, with a lot of backup materials.
  •  is another French TV channel, which has useful 6 minute  slots available online.  carries a good video summary too, with access to individual news items.
  •  has a revue de presse hebdomadaire video by its managing editor.
  •  is a Lyonnaise weekly news magazine.
  •  is another regional newspaper.
  •  - the state broadcaster includes such stations as , France Info, Radio Bleu, and  (tune to 91FM to receive this music station in Brighton).
  •  is the leading independent radio station.
  •  serves Martinique and Guadeloupe.
  •  is one of Senegal's main daily papers.
  •  from Canada.
  • , a French journal on the Caribbean and Central America.
  •  - a listing from Lehman College, City University of New York.

  Learning resources

  •  - the University Library subscribes to the full, unabridged bilingual Oxford dictionaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  •  from the Conseil international de la langue française.
  •  from TV5.
  •  from Université de Caen.
  •  from Laboratoire ATLIF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française).
  •  also from ATLIF.
  •  from the Ministère de la Culture.
  •  from le Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel
  •  - murder mystery where you play the role of the Inspector Roger Duflair's assistant; choose your level (beginners to advanced) and practice listening comprehension, grammar and vocabulary in context. Includes worksheets and online activities for classroom use.
  •  - a large range of quality resources from , a self-contained online course for beginners, through to , an intermediate audio magazine, plus transcripts and bonus material for their TV and radio courses, and much more.
  •  provides interactive activities for French teachers and learners, featuring hundreds of exercises, some of which have audio samples of native speakers. It's all organised by year of study and includes reading, writing and listening exercises. Charged in UK school hours.
  •  by Jacques Léon, intended to allow you to understand written French. Includes audio pronunciation.
  •  (Université de Lausanne).
  •  teaches and tests vocabulary at a variety of levels, including interactive scenes with audio.
  •  - includes a guide to , and Tandem, a bilingual magazine, as well as links to other relevant sites. From the French Embassy in London.
  •  - UK organisation promoting French language teaching and research into French linguistics in Higher Education.
  •  - revue de la 
  •  - one man's account of the resources he found invaluable for survival in Neuchâtel.

  Sources for further research...

  •  - bilingual reflections on words, expressions and the difficulties encountered on the bridge from the English to the French language, from a Brighton-based translator.
  •  - original articles, lessons, exercises and lots of links, plus discussion forum and chat room.
  •  (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) - includes a corpus of around 2000 French texts for research (access restricted to some parts), a French/English dictionary, thesaurus, and a .
  •  - online yellow pages/residential phonebook from France Télécom
• German language learning resources

  News and media on-line

  •  have an extensive site; aside from the expected news and schedules, they have a daily audio  (Slowly-spoken News) with transcript, and .
  •  - online version of the big daily.
  •  - selected articles from the political magazine.
  •  - "Germany's largest illustrated weekly"
  •  is an Austrian newspaper.
  •  is the German TV channel available via satellite in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre - their  are online.
  •  - a magazine for young people.
  •  is one of the largest film websites in Germany: interact with a community of native speakers around a database of over 50,000 movies with associated criticism, local and internationals reviews, and daily news articles.

  Learning resources

  •  - the University Library subscribes to the full, unabridged bilingual Oxford dictionaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  •  - German<->English dictionary including audio pronunciations and declinations.
  •  is a respected user-generated German-English translation dictionary.
  •  - animated articulatory diagrams from the University of Iowa (requires Flash 7 or above).
  •  - a jumping-off point for German literature on the Internet.
  • The  is an official organisation which represents and promotes German culture and language world-wide. Their website includes a lot of .
  •  includes lots of German worksheets and exercises, courtesy of Katherine Munro.
  •  is a bilingual English<->German dictionary containing over 2 million words with many example phrases and idioms.
  • .
  •  includes a section on , but the latest can be found at .

  Sources for further research

  •  - an Internet journal for all Germanists, on teaching and learning German in an intercultural context.
  •  - an impressive collection, including a good selection of maps relating to . From the German Historical Institute, Washington DC.
  •  - original articles and lots of links, plus discussion forum and chat room.
• Italian language learning resources

  News & media on-line

  •  allows you to search and browse hundreds of continuously updated news sources.
  •  - la guida all'informazione online
  • A number of other  are housed at .
  •  - as seen in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre here in the Sussex Centre for Language Studies. Rai also have an entertaining multimedia  searchable by year.

  Learning resources

  •  - the University Library subscribes to the full, unabridged bilingual Oxford dictionaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  •  have some good resources for learning Italian. Look out for , an Italian learning drama in which the viewer is one of the protagonists - we have the DVD version in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre too.
  •  - learn Italian with free podcasts (though you can pay for transcripts and exercises).
  •  is an interactive course from basics with a good variety of materials, courtesy of Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
  •  - rules, syntax & spelling (in Italian).
  •  - materials for the teaching of Italian to foreigners.
  •  by Lucio Chiappetti - basic words and phrases.
  •  have both a monolingual and English<->Italian dictionaries.
  •  - web version of a famous Italian etymological dictionary, also usable as a general monolingual dictionary.
  •  carries free PDFs from over 200 authors including the classics; and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa has some well-chosen .
  •  - Il portale a servizio della letteratura italiana: ricerche bibliografiche, riviste letterarie…
  •  - supporting academic Italian studies in the British Isles.
  •  organises events for lovers of Italy and Italian culture.

  Sources for further research

  •  - discover your Italian skill level.
  •  - original articles, lessons, exercises and lots of links, plus bulletin board and chat room.
  •  - showcasing Italy 1955-1965, a collaboration between Cinecittà and Google
• Japanese language learning resources
  •  has developed several free courses and plenty of other learning materials, funded by the Japanese government.
  •  for gaijin (visitors), including lots of valuable (unofficial) hints about the JET programme from previous participants.
  • And here's the official page about the  (JET).

  Learning resources

  •  offers free online study programmes produced by an experienced native Japanese language teacher. Includes writing practice sheets for , 
  •  has free video-based lessons on 1100 kanji and 7000 associated words.  offers an online Java flashcard program to help you review and drill the Japanese kanji; also available for iOS and Android.
  •  has been running for decades, with a list of recommended sites and , an online dictionary he developed.
  •  shows various aspects of Japan through reading or listening to information on 12 topics such as music, anime and manga, food, sports etc.
  •  is an information project sponsored by NTT in Japan, providing access to four Sanseido dictionaries: a big Japanese-Japanese, Exceed English <-> Japanese and the Daily Shingo (new word) dictionary. All instructions in Japanese.
  •  provides a range of online lessons from beginner level.
  •  allows you to view any Japanese website with popups that give the reading and English definition of each word; words can be added to your own word list alongside their definitions. Alternatively, you can enter your own text. The site also offers a Kanji map, flashcards and phrase/Kanji of the day. Impressive.  does a similar job, but can also show romaji readings.
    
    
  •  - videos in a YouTube playlist for the popular coursebook. 

  News and journals on-line

  •  - daily newspaper in Japanese.  also available.
  •  - daily news in Japanese or English.
  •  - another bilingual daily.
  •  - NHK Radio Japan World Service in 22 languages.
• Russian language learning resources

  Learning resources

  •  - a literature-based online course designed at Sussex to complement Literature and History options within Russian Studies here. For each author there are biographical details and a text for study with vocabulary hints, a stressed version of the text with audio, English translation, exercises, grammar, historical background, a critical essay and video dialogues about the author.
  •  - a comprehensive and well-presented guide, courtesy of Robert Beard. I particularly like the approach to the Cyrillic alphabet.  also guides you easily through learning the Russian alphabet, picking up useful vocabulary along the way - this one includes audio.
  •  - plenty for the novice and advanced students of Russian; from language lessons to web cams, dictionaries to pen pals, alphabet to crosswords, grammar to Tolstoy.
  •  is a large online Russian language learning and teaching network which includes several high quality language modules (e.g. Business Russian or a Cultural Map of Russia). It's a project of the  so there is provision for teachers to maintain dedicated virtual classroom space and to make assignments for use in conjunction with the modules, plus plenty more of interest to teachers (materials, jobs, professional bodies, assessment tools etc.)
  •  have a well-designed  of their beginners' course (as well as books and audio) for learners of Russian. The site also includes listings of where to study Russian in the UK.
  •  is an endearing little course based around stop-motion animation, full of sound and images (funded by Russkiy Mir).
  •  channel on YouTube collects videos for Russian learners. 
  • Various blogs aim at higher-level learners - try , ,  or .
  • UCLA has some podcasts on  or , at intermediate to advanced levels.
  • Much too hard? Start off with  audio & video podcast.
  •  is a podcast sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's department of .

  •  - extensive site from the US military for intermediate to advanced students. Loads of reading and listening comprehensions, grammar review (ask your own questions) and sections on cultural and scientific literacy sit alongside crossword puzzles and linguistic oddities. Constant reminders of its origin apart, there's a lot of useful material here, all presented in a surprisingly light-hearted way.
  •  has some pioneering online multimedia materials, such as Beginning Russian through Film and Dictionary of the Human Body.
  •  has open-access teaching and self-study materials for languages of Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, some specifically aimed at social sciences/humanities researchers. Languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak and Ukrainian
    
  •  and  have lots of classic 19th and 20th century literature.
  •  from Yale is an anthology of great Russian poems, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Mayakovsky. The poems are glossed and accompanied by audio files and supplementary materials on vocabulary and grammar.
  •  is a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry, many with audio readings.
  •  - portal for the Russian language with a great deal of advanced content including a selection of specialist dictionaries and a free reference service where you can ask questions. The site isn't aimed at foreign students, so it's all in Russian.
  •  (Russian from Scratch) is a communicative ab initio Russian language textbook developed at the University of Wolverhampton, available as PDF files plus interactive tests on each chapter.
  •  is a free reader for advanced learners of Russian, focusing in real detail on the language of Bulgakov, Babel, Ilf & Petrov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, etc 

  •  is an interesting translation dictionary which allows phrase searches, and can disregard morphology. It contains over 2m entries for more than 20 subjects, and also has a good list of .
  •  (Duke University) gives full paradigms for all entries, including recordings of each word form by a native speaker of Russian. 

  • Mainly for teachers:
    •  for UK teachers to help one another.
    • , the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature.
    •  is an online resource centre for teachers of Russian as a foreign language, comprising lots of  freely downloadable materials such as class worksheets.

  News & media on-line

  •  has made a lot of their films from the 1920s onwards available to watch online for free, many with English subtitles, many great classics!  have also put many of theirs on YouTube (unsubtitled, I think).
  •  acts as a catlogue of hundreds of Russian and Soviet movies with English subtitles which can be watched for free.
  •  films productions from renowned Russian theatre companies and distributes them in HD into cinemas (including Uckfield Picture House locally!), but also , which the AVÊÓƵ subscribes to. Includes contemporary productions of many classics such as Chekhov and Pushkin.
  •  is the Russian television channel available in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre here - there are programme schedules online.  can also be received free in the UK via satellite.
  •  shows many publications' current headlines on one web page.
  •  - a Moscow radio station widely seen as a source for unbiased reporting.
  •  offers news in a digestible format, and plenty of other journals.
  •  - news stories and broadcasts.
  •  includes news in English and Russian (as ).
  •  - the famous Russian news agency provides breaking news in English and Russian.
  •  - Russian news in English.
  •  hosts over a dozen literary magazines and journals, including , which carries literature reviews and translations of foreign literature.
  •  could be described as the Russian equivalent of Time magazine.

  Background

  •  - tour through Russian museums, culture and art.
  •  - guided tour.
  •  is a weekly bilingual podcast dedicated to new music from Russia, courtesy of David MacFadyen, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UCLA. Very Californian, and there's some great stuff in there.
  •  is a 'bridge between Britain and Russia', with information and links on Russian education, culture and charities in Britain.

  Trouble with Cyrillic?

  Most of these websites use Cyrillic - your computer should cope fine (including ), but if not, consult the concise guide at , or read through . There's even an online , but you may want to buy keytop stickers such as those made by .

  •  maintains in-depth information about using Cyrillic in non-Russian versions of Windows (mostly).
  •  (@PROMT Online) does a pretty good job instantly translating web pages or short  between Russian and English, also offering an online Russian keyboard and decoding.
  •  can transliterate a web page or text into Latin script as well as converting between encodings. .
• Spanish language learning resources
  •  exists to promote the Spanish language; their website includes plenty of material for students and teachers of Spanish, plus up-to-date information about cultural events. Our teachers particularly like  (short stories with pre- and post-reading exercises) and  (lexical, grammatical, sociocultural exercises).
  •  offers 15-minute podcasts (from a Scottish schoolteacher) which you can download and put on your smartphone or just play from the website. There’s a premium version with extra materials, but you can access more than a hundred audio episodes for free.

  Reference
  

  •  has the Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary, alongside some from Espasa Calpe.
  •  - the University Library subscribes to the full, unabridged bilingual Oxford dictionaries in Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
  •  gives free access to one of the best (monolingual) Spanish dictionaries.
  •  provides access to dictionaries from Vox, including their English<->Spanish offering.
  •  is an English-Spanish bilingual learners' dictionary that makes finding words easy by automatically searching in both languages.

  Learning resources

  •  have lots of high-quality Spanish material such as the BAFTA-winning Mi Vida Loca and other excellent interactive video courses.
  •  magazine has interesting articles about the Spanish-speaking world, for intermediate & advanced learners. Each article has helpful integrated pop-up vocabulary and an audio reading which allows simultaneous reading and listening. There's also a section for teachers.
  •  is a magazine (including exercises) written for learners and teachers of Spanish, with a searchable subject index of past issues. It is produced monthly during term-time by the Spanish Embassy in the UK.
  •  claims to be the first radio station for learners of Spanish as a foreign language.
  •  - el perfecto simple y el imperfecto en la narración y la descripción. Attractive interactive multimedia site providing a broad context for all verb forms. Includes animations which explain use of verb forms, 45 exercises and two adventure games in pre-Hispanic Mexico.
  •  is another excellent video-based site by the same team at Cégep du Vieux Montréal, this time using the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route to focus on ser, estar, en, a, por, para; identificación, definición, descripción, localización, desplazamiento, causa y finalidad. Woven in with the pilgrim interviews are 48 exercises at level A1-A2.
  •  offers more than 100 grammar, vocabulary, situation and cultural exercises at all levels. Also has a verb conjugator, though the old  is more comprehensive.
  •  has lots of exercises, grammar and links. See also  - a collection of on-line grammar exercises from Juan Ramón de Arana.
  •  - a free online tutorial.

  Literature

  •  - a comprehensive virtual library for Hispanic Studies, offering electronic editions of thousands of works spanning many centuries. This is a very valuable tool for students of Spanish.
  •  is the website of author Luis López Nieves, which has a good collection of links for Spanish literature & language.
  •  has contemporary short stories in Spanish by authors from all over the world, plus vocabulary and grammar exercises, comprehension questions etc.

  News & media online

  •  is one of Spain's most popular newspapers, which also has  on-line, its Sunday supplement with a good range of full-text articles.
  •  is another popular daily.
  •  - Catalunyan daily paper (in Castillian).
  •  - right-leaning daily news from Spain.
  • Latin American countries are also well-represented; see for example  from Mexico,  from Argentina,  from Colombia,  from Chile and Puerto Rico's  news summaries.
  •  - as seen in the Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre.
  •  TV from Andalucia (for practice with that tricky Southern accent!), or try  TV from Chile.
  •  is the Spanish-language website of the BBC World Service - lots of features to read and watch, plus a live feed.
  •  newspaper in Spanish.

  Sources for further research

  •  is the UK Association for the Teaching of Spanish in Higher and Adult Education.
  •  (LANIC) at the University of Texas is a comprehensive directory of Latin American web resources organised by country and by subject.
  •  has lots of well-presented information on Hispanic higher education.
  •  - Lingüística en la Red is an Internet journal on theoretical and applied linguistics, with a slant towards issues in Spanish as a Foreign Language.
  •  - original articles, lessons, exercises and lots of links, plus bulletin board and chat room.

 General language resources and toolkits

• Language learning resources
  •  is an online resource centre providing good pathways for learning languages using quality websites. It offers support for adult learners on how to learn a language, how to assess your level and how to communicate with other learners online, developed by language learning specialists throughout Europe.
  •  - free Flash-based activities in French, Spanish, Italian and German at several levels developed by London Metropolitan University. There are 11-12 topic-based units per level which take around 3 hours to complete. The 100+ exercises per unit cover the main skills of vocabulary, listening, reading, writing and grammar through challenging activities.
  •  includes several self-contained online courses, plus lots of supplementary material for their courses, transcripts etc. There's a separate site for their .
  •  - if you're a student or staff member here at the AVÊÓƵ looking for informal language practice, you can subscribe to our Study Direct site and use the forums to find someone to chat with in your target language. There is also a regular term-time  bringing together Sussex students who are learning foreign languages with overseas and exchange students who are studying English.
  •  - find a partner to practise with, and use topics, ideas and materials from this project, 'Smart Educational Autonomy through Guided Language Learning', an EU-funded collaboration between 20 higher education institutions.
  •  is an online community for learning languages, with their own audiovisual learning and grammar units but also integrated video-chat so that you can practice your language skills in a live conversation with a native speaker.
  •  does something similar, enabling language exchange by listing other members who are native speakers and who may be learning your language, so you can then communicate as an email pen pal, by text chat or Skype.
  •  has absorbing pictorial vocabulary guides where users place their cursor over any of the images to hear their names pronounced and see them spelled out. Available so far in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. A few interactive grammar guides and readings are also available.
  •  is an excellent self-study translation site operated by Birkbeck College London. It provides short source texts, model translations and commentaries into English from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. You must register - by emailing useyourcontact@bbk.ac.uk - but membership is free.
  •  - pronunciation guides with native speaker sounds and accents.
  •  - test your English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian and Indonesian vocabulary with gap-fill exercises.
  •  and  are two projects from Newcastle University and Routes into Languages with a diverse range of resources in various languages, although primarily aimed at school-age learners there's plenty of good material here.
  •  and  are good for young learners, offering lots of games and exercises for French, German and Spanish.
  •  offers a wealth of video clips of authentic language spoken in its natural cultural environment. Most clips have transcripts and English translations, plus cultural notes and some still images.
    
    
  •  - locate a language tutor for private classes (or a translator or interpreter) courtesy of the Institute of Linguists.
  •  - a Brighton-based language travel agency for study abroad.
  •  - one of the UK's leading suppliers of foreign language books and media;  are another.  have a good range of world cinema DVDs, listed by country.
  •  - good quality book+audio courses in 70 or so languages - now with free online audio.
    
    
  •  provides straightforward and relevant information about studying languages, linguistics and cultural studies at uni. There are sections with details and advice for before, after and during your degree, including plenty on your year abroad and for international students coming to study languages in the UK. They also have Q&As with students, an essay competition and Début, an undergraduate journal.
  •  - a free "teach yourself" tutorial to help university students to develop Internet research skills for modern languages, created by university lecturers.

  News and media

  The AVÊÓƵ Media, Arts and Humanities Resource Centre receives satellite TV in several languages and takes several newspapers and magazines; the main Library has .

  •  is a visual daily press directory that gives access to the world's largest news sites and displays a readable image taken from today's frontpage cover of each newspaper.
  •  has links to news media all over the world.
  • A selection of online  from the EFL page here.
  •  - spin the globe and listen to radio stations from around the world.
  •  broadcasts in over 40 languages; their website carries text from most of these and audiovisual content from quite a number too.
  •  is a US Government-run radio station which provides audio news broadcasts in over fifty languages. 

  Visual media

  •  offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. Explore selected content from early 1900s until today.
  •  also has a lot of video clips and is slightly more intuitive to search. Its remit is far broader, offering access to Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums: books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings.
  • ) provides subscribing UK HE institutions access to make online recordings of TV and radio from the last month or up to a week ahead. In addition to UK Freeview channels, they have several French, German and Italian stations. Programmes can be embedded in Canvas at Sussex.
  • If you want to do more digging in the archives, there's rich material at  (listing all BBC programmes),  and .
  • The  have an area on their site dedicated to their , including lots of interactive material and transcripts. There are also .
  •  is an art house blog by film students on world cinema. They have collected the best films in the public domain by country, listing only legal sources and with English subtitles.
  •  is a comprehensive searchable catalogue of film details - plots, credits, reviews etc. The  has plenty on foreign films too.
  •  has schedules for most channels that can be received in Europe.
  •  - a country-by-country list from comfm of stations broadcasting on the Internet. For radio, you could also try .
  •  has full details for all satellite TV & radio channels in the world including links to home pages, footprint maps and which satellites each channel is on, which can be browsed by country. There's even a list of free channels by country.
  •  - lots of up-to-the-minute technical detail about receiving free TV channels in the UK (analogue, Freeview and satellite), including transmitter engineering works.
  •  - a guide to the mysteries of NTSC/PAL/SECAM and more from Bevis King at Surrey University.
  •  - current local times across the world.
    
    
  •  is a good source for authentic images for language learning - handy for teachers.

  More collections of links

  •  has plenty of links aimed at the UK HE language community.
  •  is a free and open resource designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. Links to online learning materials are collected here along with annotations such as peer reviews and assignments.
  •  - a collection of websites linked together which can be browsed sequentially or at random.
  • Tyler Chambers' 
  •  links to a good selection of learning and reference grammars as well as dictionaries; maintained by Robert Beard, founder of .
  •  - a Brighton-based language travel agency for study abroad.
• Tools for studying a language
  •  and  are free, online flashcard makers which interface to smartphone apps as well as being usable on your computer. Quizlet incorporates audio (though its text-to-speech engine can be inaccurate!), but both offer a variety of games and exercises based on the vocabulary and you can browse other people's flashcard sets. 
  •  is a novel way to learn vocabulary, by associating vivid memories.
  •  lets you record 5-minute screencasts for free and without installing extra software. Your walk-through video can then be downloaded or embedded into your own pages.
  •  (moodle is what underlies this University's )
  •  is a free add-on which adds voiceboard capabilities and allows audio assignments. 
  • Russell Stannard's  is full of walkthroughs with various online tools, inspiring ideas and useful links.

  Authoring

  •  are downloadable step-by-step 'templates' that allow students and teachers to create interactive language tasks and games using their own text, pictures or voice recordings in any language. They include a Tetris variant as well as the more conventional matching and memory games. From the Australian state of Victoria's Dept of Education & Training.
  •  is an authoring suite (requires installing on your PC or Mac) for making web-based interactive teaching materials: multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises.
  •  has a selection of worksheet generators, clipart and bilingual materials (in 14 languages), plus some interactive exercises. Games include bingo, word spiral and split words. A collaboration between several Scandinavian organisations.
  •  - create comic strips online with students
  •  enable teachers to generate puzzles (crosswords, word searches and more unusual types of word puzzle) which can be used online or printed off. There are also tools for making online quizzes, and for printed worksheets (includes some ready-made).
  • Type a word into  and see it spelled out in images.
    
    
  • For copyright-free pictures and media to use when authoring, see our  page.

  Organisations and Journals

  •  is the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning, which runs the  - available online for Sussex students and staff.
  •  (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) is a professional US organisation for those interested in language education and technology, with a respected journal (not subscribed at Sussex).
  •  is the Japanese equivalent (with a free online ). 

  •  is a web-based academic journal focusing on how the use of technology impacts the process of teaching and learning languages, reporting developments in research and teaching practices.
  •  is an international journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics, which can be accessed online at the AVÊÓƵ.
  •  - another prominent international journal to which Sussex subscribes.
  •  is an electronic journal on computers and language education from Japan and Australia.

  Interesting

  •  instantly allows you to graph comparative word/phrase frequency over time, in a variety of languages. Powerful advanced options.

  Old projects

  •  (Information and Communications Technology for Language Teachers) is a web-based training course with the emphasis on language teaching methodologies that can be implemented successfully with the aid of new technologies.
  • Joe Dale's blog .
  • The  (LLTI) email list is one of the most venerable means of information exchange and debate among those interested in language learning technology - searching the archives of the discussions can be useful. It has close ties with the American  (IALLT), which publishes a journal and a range of monographs.
  •  - worksheets for students to complete while accessing the referenced web sites.
  •  is a consortium devising a methodology for the collaborative creation of corpus-based e-Learning teaching content in translation, language resource management and technology. It eventually aims to coordinate MA programmes in these fields.
  •  - Developing Language Professionals in Higher Education Institutions offers web-based staff development materials for language teaching, completely free of charge to anyone teaching in UK higher education.
  •  
• Resources for teachers
  •  is a bank of language teaching resources, which you can contribute to: store, manage and publish your teaching resources on the web. It's a repository for Open Educational Resources (OERs), enabling us to share handouts, exercises, podcasts, videos etc.
  •  from the Open University is a very similar repository, also using  as a platform.
  • It's often useful to incorporate pictures and video into teaching material, online and offline:
    •  is a good first stop, as it embeds a citation in images from Flickr (Creative Commons).
    •  is a searchable database of images for using in teaching foreign languages - don't miss Pictolang which makes games based on these.
    •  is a similar resource.
    •  from the University of Victoria; and more  aimed at language teachers.
    •  is a general-purpose multi-site search for images, music and video which you can legally use.
    •  is similar
    • This link to  has been pre-set to search only for images which free to use, share or modify (even commercially); you can do this yourself using Search Tools at the top of any image search results page.
    •  offers public domain images - no attribution necessary.  specialises in large copyright-free photos - mostly inspiring landscapes, good for backgrounds and banners (you have to rely on serendipity, it's not searchable).  is similar (less emphasis on landscapes), or try .
    •  from a useful blog post at Open Education Database.
  • And for videos, try searching on  and  as well as the usual suspects (YouTube, Vimeo etc)
  •  offers advice for the UK HE community on the use of still/moving images and sound.
  •  is an EC-funded project bringing together current digital video ideas and innovative practices for teaching and learning languages.
  • Telecollaboration is a rewarding use of the Internet for language classes, 'e-pals' or 'key pals' by email, blogs or synchronous meetings.
    •  is a platform to get university staff around Europe together to organise and run online intercultural exchanges for their students; part of the EU-funded  project. A modern version of the old .
    •  - e-mail lists for teachers to find classes for e-mail exchanges.
    • There are more of these for EFL/ESL students - see our  page.
      
      
  • The  have an area on their site dedicated to their , including lots of interactive material and transcripts, and a section for .
  • The BBC's commercial arm  publish their packaged courses, and have a  where you can sign up for a genuinely useful monthly email newsletter which ranges far beyond their materials.
  •  supports language teachers in their efforts to make effective provision for learners of all abilities, including dyslexic, deaf or autistic learners, for instance. 
  •  including reviews and a database of journal articles on the subject.
  •  at the University of Pennsyvania is a good starting point for browsing the treasure trove of online literature - there's a list of links to foreign language repositories.

  Organisations and Journals

  See also individual language links pages for organisations, journals and mailing lists specific to a particular language - lots are listed on our .

  • , the Association of University Language Centres for the UK and Ireland - a member of , the European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education.
  •  (University Council of Modern Languages) is the national organisation which represents the interests of modern languages, linguistics and cultural and area studies in higher education.
  •  (the Association for Language Learning) is the UK's major subject association for those involved in teaching modern foreign languages).
  •  is the European Centre for Modern Languages, a Council of Europe institution aiming to promote excellence in language education and catalyse reform in the teaching and learning of languages.
  •  - the Materials Development Association includes printable teaching materials and articles from their newsletter, Folio.
  •  - actually the  member list but most are there, complete with links to their web pages.
    •  was an EU-funded project run from CILT which still has a useful Language Resource Centre handbook available.
  •  (Foreign Language Teaching Forum) is an e-mail discussion list;  are available on the web.
    
    
  •  is the research journal from , and provides a forum for scholarly contributions on current aspects of foreign language and teaching. LLJ is an international, peer-reviewed journal that is intended for an international readership, including foreign language teachers, language teacher educators, researchers and policy makers. Sussex is a subscriber and can .
  • Language Learning in Higher Education is the journal from , dedicated to disseminating the best results of research activities carried out at language centres and higher education departments.
  •  journal publishes work related to the teaching of any second language (including English), including issues concerned with programme, syllabus and materials design, methodology, the teaching of specific skills and language for specific purposes.
  •  is a refereed publication for teachers and researchers of all modern foreign languages and English as a second language.
  •  journal - (or rather, "international research resource for language professionals") provides an overview of research in the field of second-language teaching and learning, offering critical survey articles of recent research on specific topics.
  •  publishes research into language with relevance to real world problems.
  •  publishes theoretically grounded reports of research and discussions of central issues in second and foreign language writing and writing instruction.
    
    
  •  lists thousands of articles of open-access language research. 
  •  is a peer-reviewed platform (from Liverpool University Press) for the open access publication of research from across the modern languages to a global audience.
    
    
  • eBooks - the University Library subscribes to various collections, many of which are listed on their  but it's also worth checking the  collection which includes many  from publishers such as Taylor & Francis, Wiley etc.

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