Finding Useful Resources at Spanish Department Websites
There are hundreds colleges and universities that have a Spanish department and the majority of these have a website. Let’s do some investigating and see what useful information and resources we can find from these sites.
Find some Spanish Department websites
The first step is finding some good Spanish Department websites. You can try different directories of colleges, such as AZ College, or just go to good old Google or any of the other search engines. Try putting in searches for things like:
- Spanish department (okay, that one was kind of obvious)
- college Spanish department
- Spanish 101
- Introduction to Spanish
- Syllabus for Spanish
- Textbooks for Spanish
- Spanish practice exam
If you find that you’re getting too many junk sites in the search results, try tacking on the search operator inurl:edu (works in Google). For example the search for Spanish 101 returns a bunch of spammy sites, but if you search for “spanish 101 inurl:edu” it will only look for pages on university (.edu) sites. Another good tactic is looking for individual Spanish professors’ personal websites, by searching for things like “Spanish prof”.
Now let’s look for the resources
To find good resources, you’ll usually just have to click around the sites you find and see if they have anything good. Here are some golden tidbits I’ve found, which should give you an idea of what you can find too. BTW, These are all free.
1. Cornell College has some practice exams for various levels (101, 102, 103, & 205) of Spanish where you can test your Spanish skills. You can also test your listening comprehension with this test.
2. MIT has some good stuff like a list of Spanish language news and magazines (I recommend this), as well as a program called Open Courseware that allows you to view or download entire courses, including in-class activities and multi-media support material. You can browse several Spanish courses here. The Foreign Languages & Literature department at MIT also has some cool projects going on, such as No Recuerdo, which is an interactive video project that provides students with a sort of “simulated” total immersion in Spanish. You can view/use parts of it via the link above, but the whole project is only available on CDROM. Also check out some Spanish-language interviews from the España de Cerca project. MIT has *lots* of resources, and I’ll finish off with the Mexico Living Guide, which will bring you up to speed with maps & directions, and advice about food, transportation, safety, nightlife and business norms for Mexico.
3. The University of Texas operates LANIC, the Latin America Network Information Center, which is basically a directory of Spanish-language websites, and sites about Spanish or Latina American countries or topics.
4. Some other assorted resources: A collection of Spanish realia (Photographs of authentic items from Spanish-speaking countries, usually with text in Spanish). I also like Berkeley’s PhiloBiblon which allows you to search ancient Spanish manuscripts. (Note: it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, let’s hope it’s just a temporary hiccup).
Now it’s your turn to go see if you can find even better resources! If you do, let me know in the comments.
